[SP] Photonic

[BEARD!]

spongylover123 wrote:

I recommend, when the player transitions to the next room, and he/she can't go in it again, kill everything in the previous in the room you can find.

I also recommend adding areaportals.

Equally, turn off the stuff near the end of the map when the player spawns; turn it on when they get there!

[sicklebrick]

It's a shame.. I'd really like to get into this map, but at some point in the last 2-3 updates, my PC decided it couldn't handle more than 3 lasers in a level.. even if they were active, but nowhere on screen. From what I've played I'd give it a 4-5 just for reminding me of chocolate

[KennKong]

I enjoyed the first room quite a bit, the second doesn't count, and I was annoyed by the third. It is clear that a lot of work went into making this, but the end result was less than satisfying. I give it 4/5, despite the following long list of criticisms:

1. Custom textures are great, but reversing the portalability sense of the walls was not a good choice
2. The custom indicators looked nice, but lacked the x/check marks, so they weren't an improvement
3. The first room was rather bright, which it would have been less so if the wall colors weren't reversed. On the big plus side, it is much easier to see where a laser hits a dark wall.
4. Lag, as mentioned
5. Music, as mentioned
6. Lasers in tight quarters. Why do mappers insist on putting lasers right next to walls? I died twice playing this because the f*ing laser pinned me to the wall.
7. Using spheres when cubes would do. I hate trying to drop cubes or spheres into receptacles when there is time pressure. Superbuttons are much more forgiving.
8. Pack custom content into the .bsp, please. It's annoying to track down all those files when you want to delete a map (not this one, though, it's a keeper)

[BEARD!]

Just to note: in one of the more recent updates, Valve seem to have fixed the performance issues with lasers, and the map is now vastly more playable.

[wstrika]

Holy shit, this map is amazing. Great work on those laser puzzles, p0rtalplayer.

[wstrika]

[Brainstone]

in terms of creativity and gameplay, this map was flawless. Good job. I have to comment on two technical problems though:

- Several frame rate drops.I really never had such intense lagging in any other map I ever played, I'd consider my computer as good (ca. one year old)
- Your music got redundant very soon and started to nag me a bit.

I really liked the start and ending. coll idea.

[Dinosawer]

I liked this one a lot. The style was nice, the fact you could only put portals on the dark walls was a bit confusing at first but I got used to that quickly.
The puzzles were good, not too difficult, I only got stuck a short time in the last chamber cause I didn't know you can put an edgeless safety cube on a button. I expected they would roll off, given their tendency to roll everywhere even if you put them down gently.
The second puzzle was way too simple though. Introducing the fling was not a bad idea, I think, but maybe you could've added some laser relays to make things a bit more difficult or something like that.
The music was good but there only seemed to be enough of it for 1 chamber, it got quite repetitive.
I strangely enough didn't notice any lag, which is strange since this computer is not really high-end and lags rather quickly.
To be short, I had a lot of fun with this one, keep mapping!

[p0rtalplayer]

Bit late here, but I haven't been keeping up with TWP so much lately.

First off, thanks for the awesome video review, wstrika! And everyone else who said they liked it, I did put a rather lot of work into it.

Second, I'd like to explain a couple of my decisions while making the map.
So, what's the deal with the reversed textures? That concept was actually something I was experimenting with a looooooong time ago in Portal 1, using Colossal's confinement texture pack. In fact, I first used the concept in Ad Hoc, which I believe is on this site somewhere. In that map, there was a relaxation-vault like area that you end the map in, presumably in some sort of new wing of aperture. I was planning a sequel to that map called Ad Infinitum, which would use the reversed textures and feature heavy fling puzzles. That map was cut short, however, by the announcement of Portal 2. Skip a couple of years, and I still had the map sitting around unfinished. I didn't particularly like the puzzles, but I loved the visual aesthetic. So I decided to reuse it in a Portal 2 map, and I got vanSulli on board with the music.

The map's difficulty curve is more of a lack of a decision than anything else. Basically, I made a couple PTI puzzles just to block out what you'd be doing in the map, and then made them into more or less the rooms you see now. The second room, as I explained before was an afterthought and as such doesn't really fit in very well.

I recently attended a game design summer workshop at Digipen, and I learned a lot of things there that I think would have made this map better. For one thing, I throw the player into the first room with no introduction of the reversed textures, at all. In the original portal 1 map I mentioned, I had you start in a relaxation vault with no portalgun, and had a small room that forced the introduction of the portalability of surfaces. Second, the map's difficulty/interest curve is nowhere near what makes a good map. I start with a hard puzzle, have a super-easy one in the middle, and then end hard again, where I should start with something easy, ramp it up, and then ramp it up again.

Finally, for the lag and optimization problems, all I can say is that I didn't personally experience them, and the only one of my playtesters that did usually has terrible framerates anyway. I will attempt to use areaportals and such to better advantage in future maps, so thanks for the feedback.

tl;dr: I made some bad decisions along the way, and also this map was originally a portal 1 idea.

[Test Subject #54067]

I didn't find the music annoying at all. Loved the map, had no problems with it.

5/5 from me.