Quote from xdiesp on August 24, 2011, 9:06 pm

Basically it's the Wheatley boss fight without the puzzle element of hitting him from the right angle, but with much faster shots from 2 directions.

There's a couple drawbacks with the core mechanics. One, the bomb portals open freely which paired with not being there any portal placers on the ground, make the catching process quite imprecise (map Olympic had the same problem). Two, as soon as you learn that if you stay by a wall then the portals open only on the other side, the fight turns upside down: it gets better actually, because the catching process is more ordered. And it's never fun to have stuff happening behind your back, imho it would be best to keep a single wall of shooters - or multiple instances in a big chamber, where you still can't be hit from 2 directions.

If I may, in practice this means that the fight boils down to walking backwards while shooting portals at your feet: if you're going to feature a different set of portals, you might as well use them for transportation (requiring the player to enter them) or they would be just dispensers. The rate of fire is probably too high, but that's unimportant compared to the rest (also a full white room isn't the best). Bug: you can already enter the bomb portals and get trapped.

Quote from MasterLagger on August 24, 2011, 9:26 pm

Ok, some good stuff there. A few questions though:
1) Are Portal Placers spots where a player shoots a portal and sets itself (the portal) in that spot?
2) When you entered the boss's portal, were there bombs firing out of them? It would help to know the specific event in which you entered the portal.
3) What's wrong with a full white room? I mean, there is no real reason to add metal to the room.

Since you can enter the boss's portals, I may add an additional part to the boss battle since the bomb spawner room is right next to the boss chamber.

Quote from xdiesp on August 24, 2011, 10:00 pm

1) Yes, implicitly the system would have shooter-placers and portal-placers aligned;

2) To enter the portal and get stuck, I went back up on the ledge below the fizzler and then portaled close to a bomb portal which stayed dormant;

3) What's wrong with a full white room, is what's wrong with a house with nothing inside but walls. It stands, but is uninteresting as hell. See how fellow Clean maps tried their best not to generate visual boredom: [sp] YinYang_theLAGmaster & PSICODELIA Test One v1.2 But beyond arguments, this just falls under the "attention to detail" parameter which makes authors great.

Quote from MasterLagger on August 24, 2011, 10:46 pm

Ok, regarding to the Portal Placers, I think that might make the boss battle a little to easy, since the portal automatically moves to that spot where the bombs land.
That ledge was made to observe the room and I forgot to take it out, but now that it's there, I guess I could somehow use it for part of the battle.
As for the white room, if this were a puzzle room, I would put a little more consideration into using more textures, but I don't think detail is as important in a boss room. I might make the walls that the portals spawn a little different in pattern and color.

Here's what I'll will do as far as changes go:
-Make the bomb spawner room part of the boss fight in which the player will sabotage the Portal Bomber.
-Make the ledge the area the boss portal will appear when the boss is stunned by a bomb.
-Create a dropper object so bombs don't look like they're spawning from thin air.
-Add a door connecting the boss and bomb room so the player can't get stuck.
-Possibly change the Boss's shield texture.

Quote from Skerik on August 25, 2011, 5:20 pm

Ther is a very easy way to beat the boss. You stay in an angle, put a portal just near, and the bomber will still bombing through the portal you placed and never touch you.

Quote from Brainstatic on August 25, 2011, 7:08 pm

Skerik wrote:

Ther is a very easy way to beat the boss. You stay in an angle, put a portal just near, and the bomber will still bombing through the portal you placed and never touch you.

This. A noble attempt at a boss battle (and a pretty good basic concept if I may add), but you can just stand in one place the entire time with your blue portal right in front of you and your orange positioned on the back wall so as to constantly hit the boss. Possibly you could find some way to add some random variance to the bomb drop speed.

Another slight problem is that all three "phases" are exactly the same. Maybe on the second phase you could have panels flip down around the edges of the room to expose slime water. And on the third phase it could begin to occasionally drop bombs from the ceiling. There should also be something significant about the mid-phases beyond just the boss has a magical shield so you're not allowed to hit it even though it's still throwing bombs at you. Ease up on the bombs during those mid-phases, and add some new threat like a few turrets that pop out of the walls with panels over time while the boss has its shield up. That should help to mix up the action a little.

Also, it would help to have the boss' secondary portal be a different color than your own. Or at least add something visually distinct on the other side of its secondary portal, like a discouragement field, which would serve a dual purpose of also preventing the player from entering the boss portal.

Quote from xdiesp on August 25, 2011, 7:33 pm

What three phases?

Quote from Brainstatic on August 25, 2011, 8:09 pm

xdiesp wrote:

What three phases?

I'd hardly call them phases in their current form, but before you hit the boss, that's phase 1. Phase 2 begins after you hit the boss for the first time, and phase 3 starts when you hit the boss for the second time. Bosses in most games try to mix up the action by switching up their movement, attack, and defense patterns on subsequent phases.

Quote from MasterLagger on August 25, 2011, 10:24 pm

I am currently working on the "mid-phases." Forcing the bombs to stop and encourage the player to go through the boss's portal that will spawn on the ledge. The ledge also has a shield to prevent players from entering before hitting the boss with bombs. Inside the bomb room, the player must try to sabotage the Portal Bomber by sticking a physic's object inside a "ball catcher" which directly on the opposite side of the "ball launcher" and the core. Doing so will make a door back to the boss's main lair open and start the next phase.
The end of the boss fight will also be different, instead of the core catching on fire, after the end of the "3rd mid-phase" the core will pop out of the "ball launcher" and will be "collected" by the player making the core useful in a later level. There will be other cores that will be collectible and used later in the map-pack.