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[SP] Compact Compression

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My second map for portal 2. A fairly straight forward medium difficulty map, with slightly longer than medium length.
Utilizes moving buttons to create unique triggers.

File Name: Compact Compression V1.2.zip
File Size: 2.96 MiB
Click here to download Compact Compression

nice i like the use of crushers but getting the ball into the slot was a bit tricky

The hardest part was

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"hey, look up! There are three white portalable pixels up there."

But there was some nice ideas there. Some of them i liked
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use of crushers, placing the ball
, some not.

I usually demorec the blind ride of every map i try, if you want it send me a private message.
(I'll stop recording if i die.)

Map plays nice, but

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you really need to tell people they need to to go up after getting the first cube, and I didn't see the excursion funnel at first, either. Arrows would help.

Amazing map. I love the part with the

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numbered crushers.
If I could, I would rate this 6/5. :thumbup:

Not in cruelty
Not in wrath
The REAPER came today
An angle visited this grey path
And took the cube away

This map has some clever puzzles! Especially the part where

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you have to do different things with the lasers, and the crusher sequence. "Do I really put it here?... checks numbers... Yes, completely sure of it. Saves game... checks again..." :) )

I have a few suggestions for improvements:

spoilers

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As Metafrank said: add some indicators for the ceiling shaft and the excursion funnel. Most players will never look up unless told to do so by clearly visible indicators at eye level.

For the excursion funnel you can add the player-flying-through-funnel symbol down below, with an arrow pointing upward. (Don't rely on sound; sometimes players may have the game sound turned off.)

For the shaft at the beginning, it may help to move one of the light bridges up to the shaft opening so it's blocking it. Make sure it's clearly visible to players when they first enter the room. Also don't put a portal surface near that bridge, so it is absolutely clear that it's only purpose is to block you from going there, and that you need to shut it off to proceed. I would say that you can then also get rid of the step fling, but that's just my opinion because I hate those things. If you do decide to keep the step fling, hide the white panel at the top better. (That's what infernet89 refers to.)

I also found it tricky to catch the ball with the two buttons. Perhaps set the funnel speed a bit slower or add a trigger_teleport or other mechanism that centers the ball over the buttons when it's close enough, so players don't have to time it so accurately. Just figuring out this part is already good fun; the finicky timing bit ruins it a bit IMO.

Sendificate series: Sendificate | A Beam Too Far | Airtime | 302
Other Portal 2 maps: Medusa Glare
Portal 1 maps: Try Anything Twice | Manic Mechanic

Thanks for the feedback! I suppose I could add a few more arrows here and there, but there's nothing necessarily game breaking.
I'm actually surprised it can take a bit to look up, generally when I start feeling like something/a direction is missing, I look up.
The light bridges initially were used to serve as a blocker to an excursion funnel to let you go upward...then I realized that excursion funnels go through them. >_>
They essentially should make a player go 'why are there so many light bridges here? seems like complete over kill, maybe they're trying to block something...'

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(this case being an infinite loop fling)
was the effect I was going for.
The excursion funnel does need tweaking, I figured it was slightly annoying to deal with it as well, but still passable enough.

Quote:
The light bridges initially were used to serve as a blocker to an excursion funnel to let you go upward...then I realized that excursion funnels go through them.

Funny. That was my original idea for the map sp_interception. When I realized that the mechanics isn't working out, I had to adapt the map for another puzzle. :)

I had problems with my save.

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I managed to raise one of the crushers enabling me to enter the space under it. When I tried to move the portal, the crusher came down and killed me AND created a save point.. I went into an endless crusher death

I did a gameplay video:

rXIAAEMe82E

You can see I struggled a fair bit with

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flinging myself up
in the first room;
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portal funneling didn't seem to work at all there, so it was a fair bit harder than it had to be
.

Also in the first chamber, the "compressed" cube only seemed to activate one half of the light bridges. I could "fix" this by walking up to it and grabbing/letting go until it was sort of sideways. Wasn't sure if that was intentional or not.

The fact that

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the ball catchers would activate for a few seconds, then deactivate
struck me as odd as well.

All in all after I got past the first

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fling
I thoroughly enjoyed this map.

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