[SP] Anomaly
A medium-long map I made for the Portal 2 Summer 2011 Mapping Contest. Contains discouragement beams, blue and orange paint, excursion funnels, turrets, and more. Difficulty: Medium-hard.
File Name: Anomaly.zip
File Size: 10.54?MiB
Anomaly
Was pretty good. I enjoyed the first and second puzzles, the third was a bit of a pain
Bugs: Near the start, the ramp tiles come up. They are a bit bugged if you turn them on and off really fast. Not sure if that's fixable.
A worker's map with clearly cut, operose smoothed chambers. Got to appreciate the highly planned puzzles and enviroments, but don't expect particular enthusiasm in the performance.
I think I broke the second puzzle by
One word came to mind playing this map: inventive! I really enjoyed all of the puzzles employed, and I think the usage of gel was really interesting. You call the map "medium-hard" and I'm not sure I necessarily agree - but that's not a bad thing at all.
My biggest complaint - and the fact that this is a small complaint should show you how I feel about the map - is the usage of a duo-box dropper in the final room. This never works out and I wound up having to grab one of them mid-bounce to get them free.
Visually, a great example of clean style maps, though I didn't quite get the "Wheatley" vibe. You did a great job texturing and varying up walls, but I still got the sense that the first two puzzles (the first room and the room with the water) were nothing more than boxes. The first room I want to blame on the lighting - it almost seems too well lit. The water room though just felt very flat to me.
Please tell me this is an intended solution for how to deal with the turrets. If so then awesome, I like knowing that I can keep the portal from the first room and use it in the second.
I managed to skip absolutely everything in that big open room by putting propulsion gel along the floor and just jumping over here, reflectocube from the first room in hand. Intended? I didn't even notice the small room with the switch until after I beat the map and I was examining it with noclip.
In summary: excellent entry into the contest, this map is definitely going to do well.
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This map was fun and challenging. It would make for a good speedrun map.
Thought the second chamber was the most funinteresting.
Not sure what the intended purpose was of the Blue gel in the final chamber. The puzzle can be solved without the gel. I am guessing there are multiple solutions, and I found a solution that did not require using the Blue gel.
I tried to find a speedrun for your map;
I did the route in 3 segments, although speedwise it still could be improved.
I first try to open the door as fast as possible, portal to the other side and get the cube there as fast as possible. I then portal the cube through the emancipation grid and solve the puzzle. Followed by smart portalling to preserve the cube. I then portal the laser into the top catcher and from the other side portal it into the lower catcher to open the end door.
it was fun to play with this map! 
May I point you to my thread (post40066.html) which shows a few glitches in your map.
Thanks for the feedback guys, it's good to hear.
A lot of these puzzle skipping solutions would probably have been resolved with playtesting, unfortunately because of time I didn't get the chance to do very much (I had a friend go through it while I watched him in co-op mode). Ah well, I might go back over this map later and see what I can fix or upgrade.
The first room's lighting was probably flat looking because most of it was the plain white inset lights. I wasn't sure what to use, and ended up defaulting to white. I'll try to vary it more next time.
The second room was actually designed around the fact that I was trying to use one of the original game's goo flow maps. It probably turned out box-ey because of that. I stayed up until 2 am one night detailing those walls 
The gel dropper in the third room was a last minute addition. I needed a way to get the cube dropper to drop cubes (also a near-last-minute addition, hence the glitchiness of the cube dropping) and having the laser catcher do it was too confusing to my friend. Just goes to show that a good map requires planning.
By the way, I was going to do a more Wheatley-esque style, but by the time I had finished rooms to detail, the contest was almost over and I didn't want to rush it, especially considering it's still new to me. I ended up sticking with GLaDOS clean rather than Wheatley clean.
Very smooth, solid gameplay, though I might complain that the puzzles were a little *too* easy. They required a fair amount of actions, but not much thought, with the exception being that "oh crap!" moment just when you think you've solved the last one.
Speaking of that last chamber, a little problem arose for me when I accidentally covered the bit of floor I was supposed to sit the redirection cube on with repulsion gel. I had to jump into the grinder and start over, so maybe that bit should be made of an un-gellable surface? (Do those exist?)
Great job overall though.