Quote from CrazyGuy on June 16, 2011, 3:24 am

Here's two maps that are ideas I had been playing around with in my head for ages. These Wheatley styled chambers use gel and lightbridges in new, never before seen ways (at least not seen in any of the valve maps.)

These are two separate maps (that are spatially relative to one another) I just haven't joined them yet. And remember this is WIP so I haven't finished the detailing or connecting all the tubes yet. I guarentee though that these two areas are 100% soveable (AREA 2: The final solution to the area is to hit the target seen outside in the back. My intention is to place either a THIRD TEST AREA there or a path straight to the elevator.

I consider these (at least the first one) to be fairly advanced difficulty, so keep trying there IS a solution, and once you find it the actual execution shouldn't be too hard (I used plenty of placement helpers)

I'd like to talk about my thought processes for starting these maps, but it will contain spoilers, so it will be all black blocky.

area 1:
[spoiler]In the co-op lightbrige part, I noticed my co-op partners would do this thing where they kept repeatedly shooting lightbridges at a wall, slightly higher each time, so that they climbed straight up the wall. I thought i'd do a map where you are forced to do that to gain height. Also, playin the game I noticed that if a lightbridge is hitting a ceiling, then you can fire a portal at any angle and cause the bridge to "rotate" as it comes out the other end. So I thought i'd have the player use that same lightbridge at various different angles, which leads to the next thought:
In the final valve Co-op campaign, I saw that you can paint lightbidges with gel, and they used it on a vertical bridge and had the second player shoot the gel at it. I wanted to try and incorporate this into an SP map, but the main problem is the paint has to be directly over or shooting out at a lightbridge, so im not sure how elegantly I executed that part.[/spoiler]
As for the upper area, I wanted to re-use that same blue gel from the lower area to solve the upper area. I was originally going to have a big truss fall over and break the tube and have the blue gel spray out from the corner but.. I COULD NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME FIND ANY OF THE BROKEN VACUUM TUBE MODELS!!!#!@#!@#$
Com on, Valve, what the hell?? I know you have em, you used them in the finale area, so where the hell are they in the browser?? Seriously if they ARE there then why the hell aren't they under "tube" or "broken" or "glass" even?
But I digress
That whole problem led me to the solution I used. I hope it looks good and works OK for you because maybe one time out of 10 when I tested the sequence, some of the broken panels fall onto the spot where you need to portal. I think I fixed this by putting a break trigger over the spot, but it is kinda sudden and unexplained when one of the fallen peices breaks for no reason =/

area 2:
This whole area was based on the eraser gel (water) and how LITTLE it was used in Valve maps and even custom maps i've played. And even then, the water flow was ONLY there as a bad thing, used to "block" players from painting area. I thought I'd change all that.
[spoiler]Basically I approached this problem backwards. I thought "In portal 2, how many possible ways could there be for the presence of paint, at any given location, to be a BAD thing for the player?" (because in most of the other puzzles involving paint, you can basically paint everywhere and be OK) [/spoilers]
I think I have exhausted the possibilities here, basically, two ways with the blue paint and one way with the orange I know I put them together in kind of close quarters (originally was going to have a separate area for each of the "reasons") but I thought I'd make it all more compact and put all of the [spoiler]"bad" paint spots[/spoiler] in one chamber.

And I could NOT think of ANY way [spoiler]white (portal) paint being ANYWHERE could EVER be bad (like, the fact that there is white gel on a surface as opposed to it being clean somehow prevents you from solving the puzzle).[/spoiler]

anyways enough talk here's some screenshots

Finally, if anyone has read this far, I have a few questions:
One: Do you think this is too hard?
Two: Too dark? need more light?
Three: Does the turning pipe sequence look and sound and WORK ok?

Four: Do the puzzles seem too mashed together, and does the top half of the first map seem too tacked on? cause I knew I needed to do SOMETHING up there but when it came to doing the actual puzzle I don't think I really did anything particularly new.

five: Do you consider the "bridge climbing" mentioned above to be a portalling glitch? Like, forcing the player to lightbridge climb would get your submission rejected from the contest? Cause even if it didn't work the way i've seen players do it (and I can do it) it could still be done by jumping first.

and FINALLY: Do you think this set needs a 3'rd area or do you think these first two are enough. Or let me put it this way, would a 3rd test chamber, after solving those first two, be TOO MUCH?)

File Name: CG_WIP_Gelpuzzles.zip
File Size: 3.15?MiB
Working Title: GelPuzles; areas 1 and 2 (screenshots within!)