Quote from Endrey on August 2, 2011, 9:38 pm

fucking good map - esp the 2nd one

Quote from Passenger88 on August 2, 2011, 10:46 pm

Definately one of the best maps I played. Thumps up and keep it up 5/5.

Quote from G-Money on August 3, 2011, 12:37 am

Great map!!! Especially considering it's your first one.

There was one part, however, where you could get stuck and would have to restart the entire map. The section where you get a cube that's up a stairwell that your partner has to activate. What happened to my partner and I is I put the cube through the broken glass into the next room (like you're supposed to), but then he activated the button again and destroyed the cube. We went on to the next room without me knowing this and we got stuck in that room. The only way out is if you have the cube.

Hope you know what I'm talking about and that it helps.

One tiny little bit of criticism: some white walls could not have portals on them. Sometimes it was a little frustrating.

Other than those things, this was a great, challenging map, with great atmosphere too!

Quote from weedbeat on August 3, 2011, 6:30 pm

Hey guys

Thx a lot for all the positive responses! Makes me think of doing another level

@G-Money
Now I'm thinking about it your absolutly right! That was one of the last changes we did to the map and unfortunately the intial exit plan does not work anymore due to that.. But I'll try to fix that tomorrow! Sorry you had to replay the whole level in order to get like 40 meters further

Quote from ForbiddenDonut on August 4, 2011, 12:32 am

A considerably long map that, although lacks visual inspiration, begins with developed puzzles, but unfortunately starts to fall into the conundrum of "less thinking/more execution" puzzle work that occurs when using the gel a lot.

There are a few gems of ideas here (the particular usage of glass separation/button puzzles were interesting), but there needs a few tweaks. In chamber two ([spoiler]the first propulsion gel chamber with the crushers[/spoiler]), it is possible for one player to portal over the gel by himself by standing on the tilted panel and obtaining the gel.

In chamber four ([spoiler]the introduction of the repulsion gel[/spoiler]), the opposing walls are too far apart, causing the player to bounce up at an incredibly slow and tedious way. It became trite after how many times we had to climb it to solve the puzzle.

The chamber after that, with the propulsion gel, is when the map started to shed its weakness. The walls in this room and the room after are 50/50 portalable, despite being the same white textures. If you are going to make a wall non-portalable, make it standard non-white. [spoiler]The amount of gel the player is given is so incredible small that it took us quite a while to cover enough floorspace to operate a proper runway.[/spoiler]

If one of the players enters the last chamber, the repulsion chamber, before the previous one is completed (obtaining the cube), then that player becomes stuck. Perhaps use a panel to block off the last chamber so players don't screw that up, or a way to portal back.
[spoiler]The last chamber is the weakest of all in our opinions: it basically includes covering the whole floorspace with difficult-to-spread repulsion gel (turn up the radius on your info_paint_sprayers) and perform a very easy timing puzzle. You might want to consider reducing the open time for the doors so the players have to coordinate more. Also, if a player jumps from the ledge into a portal under the button, they don't even have to use the gel for the first part.[/spoiler]

You have some good work here, but it needs tweaking. The aesthetic part of the map, which I haven't really touched on, was very undeveloped - there were old aperture doors, unaligned textures, massive wastes of space, rooms with only one texture, crushers that appeared from nodraw surfaces and dirty glass in a clean style map, to name a few. Look at reference pictures of Valve's maps and try to remain consistent with the styles, because they don't mix well together.

EDIT: It occurs to me now that we didn't play the second map. For some reason, it did not load properly for us. We will play it later and I will give the appropriate feedback when I have a chance.

Quote from glenkinchie on August 4, 2011, 12:20 pm

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

A considerably long map that, although lacks visual inspiration, begins with developed puzzles, but unfortunately starts to fall into the conundrum of "less thinking/more execution" puzzle work that occurs when using the gel a lot.

True, I agree that we used the gel a little much. Please consider that the first map is intended to be rather easy and straight forward to solve and then it get's harder until the master puzzle at the end of map 2.

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

There are a few gems of ideas here (the particular usage of glass separation/button puzzles were interesting), but there needs a few tweaks. In chamber two ([spoiler]the first propulsion gel chamber with the crushers[/spoiler]), it is possible for one player to portal over the gel by himself by standing on the tilted panel and obtaining the gel.

Thanks for this catch, we will improve this part.

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

In chamber four ([spoiler]the introduction of the repulsion gel[/spoiler]), the opposing walls are too far apart, causing the player to bounce up at an incredibly slow and tedious way. It became trite after how many times we had to climb it to solve the puzzle.

Yes indeed, we are aware of the distance problem, will be corrected.

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

The chamber after that, with the propulsion gel, is when the map started to shed its weakness. The walls in this room and the room after are 50/50 portalable, despite being the same white textures. If you are going to make a wall non-portalable, make it standard non-white. [spoiler]The amount of gel the player is given is so incredible small that it took us quite a while to cover enough floorspace to operate a proper runway.[/spoiler]

Will consider a texture change for non-portable walls.

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

If one of the players enters the last chamber, the repulsion chamber, before the previous one is completed (obtaining the cube), then that player becomes stuck. Perhaps use a panel to block off the last chamber so players don't screw that up, or a way to portal back.

We missed that one, thanks!

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

[spoiler]The last chamber is the weakest of all in our opinions: it basically includes covering the whole floorspace with difficult-to-spread repulsion gel (turn up the radius on your info_paint_sprayers) and perform a very easy timing puzzle. You might want to consider reducing the open time for the doors so the players have to coordinate more. Also, if a player jumps from the ledge into a portal under the button, they don't even have to use the gel for the first part.[/spoiler]

True. But it's not necessarily a bug, in this chamber we wanted to give the players more than one possibility to solve a particular puzzle element ([spoiler]For example: being able to jump into the tractor beam using either the broken fling plate combined with the gel or you can fling with portals.[/spoiler]).

ForbiddenDonut wrote:

You have some good work here, but it needs tweaking. The aesthetic part of the map, which I haven't really touched on, was very undeveloped - there were old aperture doors, unaligned textures, massive wastes of space, rooms with only one texture, crushers that appeared from nodraw surfaces and dirty glass in a clean style map, to name a few. Look at reference pictures of Valve's maps and try to remain consistent with the styles, because they don't mix well together.

I fully accept this comment, but please keep in mind that this is our first hammer project ever (which means even the first few clicks were made in this vmf ). We didn't follow any of the theme-based Portal 2 designs, our main goal was to develop our own puzzles as we couldn't find any coop maps. In future projects we will certainly put more effort in the design.

We thank you for your constructive criticism!

cheers,
spliffa

Quote from ForbiddenDonut on August 4, 2011, 6:18 pm

I appreciate the way you analyzed the constructive criticism. A lot of mappers (too many) get offended over it and don't take the methods to improve their work.

As for the styles - it's mostly why I didn't talk about it so much, because it's something that comes with experience with hammer. Generally, you want to make sure that textures are aligned (their square edges meet the edges of the corners/wall edges, doors match their corresponding style (you designed mostly in "Clean," so the normal panel co-op doors or the circular Aperture doors would suffice.

The thing I do (so it may not be the best thing for everyone) is that I spend a good deal of time noclipping through Valve's levels (co-op and single player) and take screenshots of everything to have references from when I start working in Hammer.

Quote from Salamandra on August 5, 2011, 11:20 am

First map:

It's not something that generally should happen, but it's possible to trap yourselves almost immediately. After getting into the (impressively large) first room, and get both people into the slightly raised glass room, if both people drop down into the first area you're actually trapped, as the only way to get back is to stand on the now inaccessible button. Not sure if there's a reasonable fix to this, but it's something to keep in mind. Also, that laser seems to be rather redundant, as the stairs aren't needed to get up to the faith plate anyway.

Unportalable surfaces which are the exact colour of regular portalable surfaces are bad.

We both came through to the last chamber without having got the cube, but it is actually possible to get it, as the following video shows. It is also possible to [spoiler]get stuck where the cube is supposed to go. I just ran in there (as we hadn't got the cube at that point), and immediately got stuck. I then had to noclip out.[/spoiler]

b7BUR-gjV0g

Second map:

I think it was much better than the first map. The first chamber was good, although I got trapped due to crouching while at the top of the excursion funnel. The second chamber was incredibly complicated, but worked quite well. As an aside, I prefer the large numbers to the pre-made and generally used signs with a certain number of dots. The numbers of course allow for a higher number of steps to be used with them, but they're just much more noticeable. Everything was pretty logical, [spoiler]although I found jumping off the platform, hitting the button then going into a portal to be annoying. What are the holes in the wall of the refraction cube room there for? Was just misleading.[/spoiler]

Rq832wd-yR8

Quote from Zelyhn on August 5, 2011, 9:01 pm

Seriously boring and way too easy map, exploitable, uninteresting... Cute you tried to map. Give up now.