Giant Bomb says:
Kim Swift is best known for her work on Portal, which was based on her student project Narbacular Drop.The basic structure (room-contained puzzles, lasers, an orb like robot in every room) blatantly mimic Portal, but are totally missing the brilliant humor, story, and art design that made Portal 1 and 2 so great. Portal is clever puzzles plus Pixar-quality character design.
Kim was a student at Digipen, she along with the students that created Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve through one of Digipen's expos for the seniors' projects. Robin Walker from Valve, approached them with an invitation to Valve HQ to make a presentation. Gabe Newell himself attended the presentation, after it was done, he pulled them aside to ask them if they wanted to work for Valve and recreate their game using the Source Engine.
The hiring of the whole Narbacular Drop team lead to Portal, which was based on the core mechanics of their student project.
In early December of 2009, she left Valve to work for Airtight Games to work on an unknown project as the lead.
