Portal designer Kim Swift discusses her new FPS puzzle game

Kim Swift, the mind behind the design of Portal, is now working as creative director at Airtight Games, and working on a new first person puzzle game, Quantum Conundrum – sounds familiar, right?

However according to Swift, the games weren’t intended to be alike, it’s more just a testament to the type of game she likes to design.

“When I left Valve I had in mind that I wanted to make another game kind of like Portal, just because I really enjoyed making Portal,” she said.

“I know how to make those kind of games and in general I just want to make games that I want to play. I guess it’s kind of selfish on my part.”

The game, to be published by Square Enix, will be available on PSN, PC and XBLA. Despite the obvious similarities to Portal, Swift says she tries not to think about trying to “top” Portal’s success.

“I’m supposed to make fun and interesting things for people to play, and I think if you’re getting so hung up on what you did before and trying to top that, it’s a really bad attitude. You’re not going to want to make fun anymore as you’re so worried about competing with yourself. I don’t want to think about it that way.”

There’s been some speculation that the concept of Quantum Conundrum was originally a Portal sequel, but Kim said the idea only came after Valve.

“I knew I wanted to work on more games like Portal but I didn’t have any particular game design in mind. I started working at Airtight on a different prototype but that got cancelled so our team decided to pitch ideas internally and decide what we wanted to work on next.

“I wasn’t the only person to pitch a game forward on my team. I think we had a total of five pitches we were trying to decide between. We all voted and decided on the concept of Quantum Conundrum, just because it was really easy for us to prototype it and see really quickly if it was fun.”

She also added that the finished game will be about 10 hours of playing time, and that they’re adding extras in that’ll make you want to play again.

“We have two different types of collectibles and we have a challenge system,” she explained.

“We’re clocking the number of times you shift dimensions as well as your time on each map. We have a leaderboard set up so you can compete to get the best score.”