[SP] Trigonometry
Part 2 in the Alien Discovery of Aperture series. A study on human perception of motion and quickness of instinct. You make your way through 4 fluorescently lit chambers designed without failure or common errors in mind.
Refined version of trigonometry with a fourth chamber.
File Name: sp_trigonometry.bsp.zip
File Size: 17.41?MiB
Trigonometry
Not a fan of the lighting.
dont really like the style - idea are sort of good - but once you figured out how to get to the other side its very annoying actually to hit everything right - i stopped playing at the 3rd chamber 2/5
I liked it mostly.I didnt care for the bland color thou.Its just so repetitive.Needs some color to liven it up.It would also help with giving the player some depth of vision.Right now you cant really judge how far anything is away nor see the fizzlers
Garish lightning and primitive geometry make the map look like a first timer's attempt at a Xen level in HL1. Puzzles are limited to trial-and-error flings. Everything is too randomly cut, skinned and boxed to hold any disbelief of actually being playing in any test: at best, you are playing a bug report.
This map hasn't been tested much so it's understandable that a lot of the flings are trial and error and don't work every time. Also since I started the fluorescent lighting trend i've put hours into adjusting the lights but haven't been able to find a good balance between show and playability. I'm beginning to think I should abandon this venture and make more standard maps but to be honest i'm getting bored of the standard mapping technique and didn't like most of the maps entered in the contest. There's a lot more potential for Portal then just Aperture standard testing and I think this shows that but I agree with pretty much all your comments and almost deleted this last night before I posted it for those reasons.
I'm working on an update to this map that should be available by the end of the day please refrain from playing it until then.
I can respect that you want to try abstractism, but that stuff requires great experience: you have to know what needs to be offset from reality, and be able to express it. But even transplanting the very same gameplay into a gorgeous Wheatley map in space, the flings would have to be painstakingly calibrated so you don't have to die a dozen times at every jump. Upload at will, all I can offer is an honest opinion after always a full playthrough.
You're right diesp this is only my second map and from the beginning my ideas were far ahead of my knowledge of hammer so I probably should have started with a simpler premise but i've always skipped the manual and tried to figure things out for myself. My learning curve is steep and I'll master it soon enough though I promise you'll have something nice to say about the third entry in this series...
I enjoyed this map quite a bit - flinging is by far my favorite part of portal, and I've been waiting for a pure fling map for a while. However, your map requires a bit of work at the moment, so I'll try to give you some general suggestions (I understand that you said you were working on improving it today, hopefully my feedback can help with your update).
Firstly, I like what you're trying to do with the lighting, but you have to be careful not to sacrifice clarity for this look. The test-taker needs to still be able to clearly observe all the elements of the test chamber, and the lighting should facilitate this, rather than impair it. The lighting right now makes it confusing as to what is and what isn't a portalable surface. It also makes it difficult to see some elements of the test, such as catwalks.
Secondly, the layout of your puzzle is probably the most important part of any map. You should play through your map as if you have never played it before. I found that on my playthrough of this map, I had to just fling myself in arbitrary places and sometimes it worked and other times it didn't, so I ended up using a lot of noclip just to (i) save myself from random deaths, and (ii) explore the map. By improving your layout, you should be able to remove the necessity of arbitrary trial and error flings and/or 'noclip' exploration.
Good luck, and I'd be happy to play through your map after the next update.