If you’ve read much of what I’ve written in the my articles, you’ll know that I sound a bit like a broken record with regards to believing that the games industry needs better tools to get on top of AAA development.  Someone at Valve obviously feels the same way, and today they released a new mini, in-engine, editor for Portal 2.

And it’s awesome.  It has limitations for sure, but I’m guessing it’s a proof of concept.  Within 10 minutes I had a fully fledged puzzle up and running, with all the triggers and doors and everything else you need to make your very own Portal 2 puzzle.  NowGamer have put up a great little guide, including this video:

This is the way forward.  I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

A small update to acknowledge a couple of things that have happened behind the scenes.

One, after waiting in the wings for a while, I’ve joined twitter. I haven’t fully settled on what exactly to tweet about yet but I this is me if you want to follow me.  I’ll add a link next to the RSS feed soon.

Far more exciting is that my latest posts on AltDevBlog have made it over to Gamasutra, the very latest of which has been picked up by Official X-Box Magazine and turned into a small news piece.  The article itself is well written and they link to a recent blog of their own in the same vein, which strengthens what I’m saying very well.  It’s an interesting time right now for game development, and a lot of people are thinking along similar lines.  We have a fun few years ahead I think.

My recent articles will make it onto this site soon; I’m just waiting until I’ve got part 3 written before adding them all here.