F-Stop (or Aperture Camera), the long rumored and unpublished prequel, the Valve Corp. intended for Portal has finally gone public – with Valve’s permission. This video from LunchHouse Software shows the gameplay and the concept of F-Stop. When you take pictures of things, you can duplicate and place them to solve environmental puzzles.
F-Stop started its life after launching Portal with The Orange Box in 2007. The game does not include Portal’s famous cannon or Portal’s teleportation technology. Instead, the namesake of Aperture Science is expanded. It seems that an earlier device that the researchers developed there is an apparently magical camera.
For example, if the player takes a picture of a ceiling fan and then places the fan on the floor, he can rise to a higher platform and escape from the test room. Players can also resize the object to be duplicated, for example, by creating a staircase from multiple blocks. Attaching balloons to an object floats it out of the room.
LunchHouse shows F-Stop in a series of videos that the developers call exposure. It’s not really clear what the studio does with the source code – what the developers got with Valve’s permission. At the moment it seems to be just a documentary, not a teaser for another game set in the portal’s canon.
