The Garry Story: Legacy Edition mod for Portal 2

Questions:

1. **Inspiration and Concept**:
- What inspired you to create "The Garry Story"?
- How did you come up with the idea of making a non-linear, open-world game inside Portal 2?

2. **Development Process**:
- Can you share some of the challenges you faced during the development of "The Garry Story"?
- What were some of the key features you wanted to include from the start?

3. **Community and Collaboration**:
- How did the collaboration between Tinnedfoil906 and MEVAR448 come about?
- How has the community around Portal 2 influenced the development of "The Garry Story"?

4. **Technical Aspects**:
- What were some of the technical hurdles you encountered while developing this mod?
- How did you address performance and compatibility issues?

5. **Future Plans**:
- What are your thoughts on the future of "The Garry Story" and its community?
- Are there any upcoming projects or updates you can share with us?

6. **Personal Insights**:
- How has creating "The Garry Story" impacted your career and personal life?
- What advice would you give to aspiring game developers and modders?

Tinnedfoil906:

Inspiration and Concept:
What inspired you to create "The Garry Story"?
How did you come up with the idea of making a non-linear, open-world game inside Portal 2?

The idea originates from the Portal Mapping and Modding's open world competition, where we had to make a map that is well... open world,
at the time i was fairly new to the community and i wasn't able to participate in any competition before that, so i knew i was going to participate in the next one (which ended up being the open world competition).

A little bit before that, the owner of Portal Mapping and Modding was messing with the new discord feature at the time, which was recording audio files directly from the app, and he talked about The Stanley Parable which reminded me of it and that an open world map fits The Stanley Parable, so that's what we ended up doing.

Development Process:
Can you share some of the challenges you faced during the development of "The Garry Story"?
What were some of the key features you wanted to include from the start?

A pretty big challenge was time management, we had a month + a couple more weeks extension, which is definitely not enough time because of how big we were planning to make it (for reference it took Galactic Cafe 2 entire years to make the original The Stanley Parable), we surprisingly managed to complete most of it, although around 2 endings had been scrapped for the time being because there was no time left.

A feature that was always there was the fact that it was an open world map, since the competition it was being made for had that theme.

Community and Collaboration:
How did the collaboration between Tinnedfoil906 and MEVAR448 come about?
How has the community around Portal 2 influenced the development of "The Garry Story"?

Everyone was discussing what they wanted to do for the map, including me and MEVAR448, we realized we both wanted to do a The Stanley Parable themed map so we started talking in dms which lead to us starting a collaboration for the entry, and shortly after, we made a group chat to discuss the map, where we also invited some other people, like CyberneticZ AKA Zee, who composed The Garry Story OST, and Spoops, who narrated everything.

Technical Aspects:
What were some of the technical hurdles you encountered while developing this mod?
How did you address performance and compatibility issues?

The technical struggle was compiling... I had to use a LOT of different programs to compile the map and its assets, and all of them failed.
I tried Hammer Addons, i tried VIDE, i tried packrat, i tried compile pal x, most of them compiled the map, but with no custom assets, which was really bad because when the owner of Portal Mapping and Modding played it, he was really confused since there was no naration and there were a lot of missing models so it was ranked last place (we had also been informed that if the assets weren't missing we would have gotten first place).

For performance, we knew some of the judges were going to rank the map based on performance, so we made a lot of brushes func_details, and we were also going to add hint and skip brushes and area portals at the very end, doing it at the end was my idea, there were so many brushes it would make navigating the map in the editor hard, but to be honest, that was not the best idea because well, we ran out of time. Even if we didn't have time to optimize it more, it wasn't laggy and it ran pretty well.

Future Plans:
What are your thoughts on the future of "The Garry Story" and its community?
Are there any upcoming projects or updates you can share with us?

I have an upcoming project that i'd like to share, a The Stanley Parable mod, called The Ultimate Parable, this mod includes The Garry Story, with improved visuals, and some of the early and late scrapped endings added back and finished, The Garry Story is also not the entirety of the mod, there is also an entirely new parable called The Mark Enigma with around 8 new endings, there's also yet another brand new parable, this one being a little bit more secret and also shorter, and to wrap everything, it actually HAS an ending, and a prologue; it might seem like quantity over quality but i assure you that it's not, everything has and will continue to have a lot of care put into it, no matter how big or small of a part it plays in the mod.

I hope that the community of The Garry Story can enjoy this brand new mod and its additions to The Garry Story.

Personal Insights:
How has creating "The Garry Story" impacted your career and personal life?
What advice would you give to aspiring game developers and modders?

My advice for game developers and modders is to not overwork yourself, that leads to burn out, burn out is horrible.
This happened to me after The Garry Story was submitted as an entry, i was burnt out, it was impossible to avoid since there was so much work to be done in such a short amount of time, but if you are working on a game or mod, and you don't have a deadline, remember to TAKE BREAKS, you can relax, take naps, watch some movie or play some game, just take a break from your project and do something else, if you don't, working on your project might become tiring, and lead to burn out, and then after that, you might lose interest in the project entirely, so it's better to just take a break every once in a while.

MEVAR448:

Didn't answer yet ):