[SP] Devil's Tower
FINALLY ! ! !
Not sure if this is the intended solution, but its gotta be close . . .
I always try to make hard puzzles but i fail everytime and cannot think very clever.
How did you manage to make your puzzles really clever and hard?
i can only speak for myself but i think jonatan i using a quite similar way of creating his puzzles.
for very very hard puzzles u need something new what players havent seen before. in this map he uses two bouncing cubes in two portals and i havent seen that before. in seven gates he used the trick with the vertical lightbridge. once u have found a puzzle element like that u need to build ur map and ur puzzle around this. its a big help to draw things on a paper especially when ure using lasers. this requires a lot of imagination and creativity. then u start adding obstacles to avoid unintended solutions or to make the puzzle harder. dont focus on the look first and change it after u finished ur puzzle. another rule is the more variables (cubes, laser etc) u add to your map the harder it gets. but the more variables u have the more inintended solutions will occur. i personally dont like big maps. that means maps with 20 rooms that are all included to the same puzzle. the player gets distracted and feels lost because he needs to explore the whole map before he actually starts solving. try to minimize your map as much as u can so the player feels close to the solution.
another trick to raise the difficulty of your map is lettin the player almost solve your map but insert a twist at the end. like in this map u were able to activate the funnel in many ways. this distracts the player from the intended way because they will always clutch on their solution. in seven gates u need to solve the map two times with little changes in the second part. the first time was hard because it included many variables. but it was only a matter of time untill u figure out the solution. in the second part he hides his evil special element. but u wont find it because u are distracted by the way u solved the puzzle first. u keep on holding at your solution and dont see many obvious things. and jonatan is a genious at hiding his special element.
Just 4/5 on this one, because the execution was much harder than the puzzle. I was doing OK on this one until I tried to get to the top cube. you really don't need to read this part
The principle behind the third lift wasn't that hard to figure out; just do the math (2 cubes X 2 portals + 1 cube = 5 targets). But I spent hours tweaking portal positions to get them all aligned. Then I spent some more time tweaking the yoyos so they would last long enough (I would get to the top just fine, but by the time I got there, they were too out of sync for the next step).
I got to the top with the cubes in sync, but the damn funnel just wouldn't grab the cube on the laser. So it was back downstairs for some more tweaking portal positions.
I got all the cubes on their way, and then wore out my F7 key trying to grab them all. My trackball was really letting me down on this step, because it tends to turn up better than down, and left better than right.
I finally had all the cubes, and proceeded to hurt my F7 key some more trying to get to the door. I think a brief cooldown timer on that wouldn't break the map.
As brilliant as this puzzle design is, I think you tipped the scale toward execution difficulty too much. I preferred Seven Gates, where finding the solution was the hard part, not executing it. So on your next map, make the 10 on the difficulty scale come from the puzzle, please?
It seems that a yawning chasm has opened up between the hard maps like you, Chander, grayarea, DieHard34 and now marKlu, and the easy maps. I wish Miss Stabby would come back with a map like Angry Bombs that was a good balance.
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@KennKong: I would suggest a different cheat if you feel you absolutely need more speed and can't get it with your trackball:
bind "1" "sv_cheats 1;host_timescale 0.1; host_framerate 300"
bind "2" "sv_cheats 1;host_timescale 0.2; host_framerate 150"
...
bind "0" "sv_cheats 1;host_timescale 1; host_framerate 0"
These will slow down the action (0 to restore). I've been using these for testing my new map and they're great for demo videos (although I may not have the framerate settings right yet).
However, to claim a clean solution to a new map I strongly believe that sv_cheats (including noclip) should never be used at any time during the process, including for practice or to gain information. What do you guys think?
I agree with this, although due to my ultra-high-precision mouse, the execution was only somewhat harder than the puzzle for me. I still spent several hours getting it right.
You can't please everyone all the time though, since I personally liked this map more than Seven Gates. I feel like the technical effort put into it was amazing. But, yeah, the meticulous execution was a downer.
I completely agree about the yawning chasm, and I think the sweet spot is right around 4-6 hours to solve a map and with execution completely trivial to perform. But again you can't please everyone because I think Miss Stabby's map was on the easy side and it's not even in my favorite map collection. But Devil's Tower (and grayarea's Encode) both are.
Absolutely. I think this is a basic assumption made by anyone who's really solving maps for fun and challenge.
My wife helped out in this respect when I designed Engineer. If she couldn't pull off the execution immediately after I explained how to do a particular piece, I didn't include it. If she got motion sick from it that also was a sign that it needed fixing too.
Overall, though, the semi-recent parade of hard maps have been so much more interesting than the sea of mediocre easy maps released in the first 6 months after portal 2 was released, so I have to reserve most criticism. Just to have such smart and talented people making maps is simply awesome.
I agree. For me, sv_cheats is surrender. How quickly I surrender depends on the apparent quality of the map. When playing Jonatan's (or your's) I know there is an elegant solution to be found, and I will struggle on for days. Then there are the maps that some create just to show their pimply-faced friends how fast their reflexes are, but the puzzle is crap. I'll cheat on those just to get them finished so I can rate them in good conscience.
But thanks for the tip on slowing the game down. That might make playing certain maps possible even with a controller.
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Another amazing map Jonatan though I like it less then devilschamber. This is mainly by the fact of very difficult execution. For me puzzle can be hardcore but I would like to have a simple execution. This map succeed only as it goes on puzzle. I was close to solve it but had to look how to retrieve the third cube. I`ve never imagined that you will be able to make the set up
