Quote from mickyficky on June 14, 2011, 9:36 pm

Okay, even though I generally prefer the 19** style look, I have to say this is certainly one of the best maps I have seen so far.
Visuals are very well done and the puzzle was quite challenging (I kept getting trolled by the fact that the bridge was on the wrong side of the blue portal, boggled my mind).

Only having 1 placeable portal available [spoiler]most of the time[/spoiler] was a very neat thing to do, and you used that very very well.

It was a little hard for me to deduce what the laser-related puzzle did, I'd say you should make that more obvious but I can't think of a clever way how that would be done.

So overall: very well done job all round, can't really find any point to criticize at all.
Keep up the awesome work

Quote from RubyCarbuncIe on June 15, 2011, 12:33 am

Thank you, I made the bridge on the wrong side on purpose to avoid people using it to their advantage. Also believe me I tried as hard as I could to make The laser puzzle's goal as obvious as possible. By adding the symbols and making the indicator checkmarks visible from the main room, to sum it all up I did everything I could think of, I'm Glad you like the map though I spent all but two days of the contest time working on it then the last two taking advice from the people here.

Quote from orange.hh on June 15, 2011, 3:17 pm

RubyCarbuncIe wrote:

orange.hh wrote:

Hey!

Really, this is a brilliant and powerful level that you have created! Amazing how you made me play it and sill enjoying it. Well, I want to be honest - I?m stucking 5 cm before its finish. [spoiler]How on earth is it possible to get the last cube to its place where it has to be set on the button?[/spoiler] I?ve tried so many things without success...

I also wanted to watch the .dem that got posted here, but I couldn?t find how to. Will someone help me to get this level solved without cheating? :p

Many thanks!

Orange.hh

what you do is [spoiler]After you get the Dual Portal Device you place two cubes on two of the buttons at the end. Then you place a Portal on the white tile above the laser disabler button and place one portal under the Excursion Funnel. Jump through the Portal grab the cube on the laserwall button and place the Portal that's not under the Funnel and there you go you've got all three.[/spoiler]
I don't really know if I explained that very clearly. But if you still need help I could post a video walthrough for you on my Youtube Channel.

Thanks to everybody for the great feedback! I appreciate how much you all like the map.

Oh, dude - life can be sooo simple
Many thanks for your assistance. I?m a little bit ashamed and felt blamed for getting this level so far and got stuck so close to its finish. And this was really somethimg that I should have found. Hehe...

I?m really looking forward to further chambers, man

Quote from SargonAnkro on June 28, 2011, 11:31 am

Very nice & climatic chamber. And very challenging too.

The only problem for me was: how to get an item from the tube which indicators goes behind broken glass & how to turn off HLBs that blocks access to the subchamber with faith plates. There was a little problem for me, because HLBs indicators goes through broken wall and I thought that there must be some button in this room with the field, which I overlooked during the game.

And yes, I solved both problem, but I have to admit: I use noclip in this case Don't get me wrong... [spoiler]I thought that HLB comin' from the lock at the celiing is the only thing there & nothing else, so I don't feel the need to checkout what's up there. I was walking around the chamber through 20-30 min trying to solve this mystery. After switching noclip to on, I saw that behind the broken glass room has also some buttons, so I leave it immediately & start to continue thinking with one portal and switched noclip to off ;] /[/spoiler] My bad.

But the rest of the map was easy peasy ;]

Quote from Adair on July 13, 2011, 3:34 am

Well, I liked this map pretty well, but I got rather frustrated at the end. This is arguably my own fault though.

First I should explain that I got most of the way through the map(almost to the point where you get the [spoiler]second portal device[/spoiler] and then real life intervened and it was a couple hours before I came back to it...

[spoiler]Anyway, I forgot I had received a second lens cube that was on the far side of the 3 light bridges in chamber 2. So I grabbed the regular cube, disabled the laser grid in chamber 1, got the second portal device and went back down to get the 1 lens cube I had remembered leaving. I get those 2 cubes up to the three floor buttons at the end and think maybe I can stand on the last one and shoot a portal through the exit door, but there's nowhere to shoot. So I went looking for a third cube(still not remembering that other lens cube) and left the other 2 cubes on the floor buttons. I found the last cube but couldn't get it because the light bridges were back on. Then I realized that the laser grid was on too with the 2 cubes behind it and I had moved the portals so I was completely stuck...now that I think about it I guess I could have used the cube droppers to get new ones, but I didn't want to redo that much of the map when I thought I was so close to the end. I reloaded from a save and did finally complete the puzzle. I just feel that this map is too unforgiving for certain mistakes, such as collecting the cubes from chamber 2 in the wrong order.[/spoiler]

Okay moving on, I apparently wasn't thinking with portals clearly for a moment because at first I missed the obvious way to get to the funnel room and used an odd method involving the light bridge and quick timing.
First I placed a portal here:
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558662295706337469/8BA706FE34E594B182CFBD986A308F647A02D3E2/
Then I jumped down by the orange portal and activated the bridge. I quickly jumped through the portals to that grated ledge area and moved the blue portal like this:
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558662295706335575/B78E611A95F69A471D8E50111410E186AFA9DC04/
Then I jumped onto the bridge and ran to the ledge of the funnel room before the bridge went away.
I felt pretty silly when I wanted to get up there again and saw a far more straight forward method.

Quote from Dom44 on August 13, 2011, 5:26 pm

When I launched this map and came to first room I was like: Holy crap this is gonna be hard as hell, but when you find out what you need and where is that thing what you need it goes by itself. I really enjoyed this map, it was designed very very well, and puzzles in this map were awesome, at first it seems very difficoult, but as I said, when you find out few thing you'll find out another and another based on the previous and it isn't even hard, it's just about thinking and taking things together, also indicator light helped me too. So,I will say, this is the best custom map I have ever played. Congratulations RubyCarbuncle, you are really amazing mappper, and I'm sure this took you a while to figure out, I mean puzzles in this map. 5/5! If you will read this can I ask you how long were you doing this map? Including figuring out.

Quote from RubyCarbuncIe on August 28, 2011, 4:45 pm

Dom44 wrote:

When I launched this map and came to first room I was like: Holy crap this is gonna be hard as hell, but when you find out what you need and where is that thing what you need it goes by itself. I really enjoyed this map, it was designed very very well, and puzzles in this map were awesome, at first it seems very difficoult, but as I said, when you find out few thing you'll find out another and another based on the previous and it isn't even hard, it's just about thinking and taking things together, also indicator light helped me too. So,I will say, this is the best custom map I have ever played. Congratulations RubyCarbuncle, you are really amazing mappper, and I'm sure this took you a while to figure out, I mean puzzles in this map. 5/5! If you will read this can I ask you how long were you doing this map? Including figuring out.

Well the map took about 2 weeks to finish up completely, as for how long It took me to figure out how to map for the better part of a year I had been messing around with L4D's L4D2's and Portal's SDKs, So i have had mapping experience before hand. Thank you for your kind words and sorry it took me so long to respond to you.

Quote from KennKong on November 27, 2011, 11:57 pm

I thought I had played all the contest entries long ago, but I definitely missed this one. Awesome looks, a moderately difficult puzzle that had me flying all over the map and enough length to give a real sense of accomplishment when finished. An easy 5/5.

Quote from Mek on December 30, 2011, 3:12 pm

Great map I must admit. But, as I read here, I had it much more easier because my portal gun was able to fire the orange portal right from the start (any idea why?). However, it was pre-placed in the bottom of the pit... but I was still able to place it anywhere else. I guess I solved the 1-portal phase all in unintennded way