Exploring Valve Archive, part 31 - Valve's design process valvearchive.com>archive>Half-Life>Half-Life 2>Art>Creatures>combot.jpg From Valve's portfolio, we can see glimpses of their design process through their early concept art. Observed above, the City Scanner we're familiar with in current HL2 started off as clean and well-labelled art, highlighting the physical characteristics and mechanisms of the machine. Certain features like the spinning rotor dictate speed, the adjustable mandible dictate hover state, and the iris dictate the mood of the machine ("Iris shrinks when pissed"). All this meticulous planning results in a fleshed out and iconic design that sticks in our heads due to its very mechanical and practical design. Among other things the Valve design team did when constructing the HL games, they planned everything to feel iconic, practical, and following the "rules" of Half-Life's reality. Elements of this meticulous planning can be seen in further HL games, with Half-Life: Alyx expanding on the Scanner design to be more detailed and physically based, and the Gravity Gloves cleverly using the rules set out by the Gravity Gun (according to the Final Hours, the Gravity Gloves contain a small Xen crystal behind the watch casing, giving it a fraction of the gravity-manipulation powers that the G. Gun does).
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