This is my map for the October contest. It has three puzzle areas, but with a slightly different approach. Find out what happened in the previous Chamber 16!

Download here or here.

Extract from your <steamid>/portal/portal directory, and load the map up through the Bonus Maps menu.

Screenshots:

I really liked this. It had a coherent theme and the puzzles were satisfying to complete.

There were some weird stuff though. [spoiler]Like the ball on a chain thingy. I spent 15 minutes playing around with it trying to do something with it (and got killed several times) and in the end just completed the chamber without it. The buttons in that room were weird![/spoiler]

yeah the ball on the chain was very annoying, a very good idea, but it can kill you and bounces around in wierd ways... took me a while to finish that part, think I did it right... [spoiler] put box on middle button, crossed chamber, used portals to make the ball shoot around and knock the box off the button, then portals to make the box fall onto the other button.[/spoiler] I spent a while just trying to fling to the platform, stopped on the other side... after getting frustrated with the damn ball

my advice, is if you plan on using the ball on rope thing more in future maps, begin with a "learn how" chamber for it, like the first chambers of the single player.

Nice! A ball & chain, eh? Very unique.

Please consider uploading to myaperturelabs.com.

Thanks for creating great Portal content!
Nick

You sound like a frickin bot.

Cmon man don't advertise, even if you don't intend to.

Tis a very awesome map though. Review coming soon.

Not a bot; I'm quite fleshy.

Advertise? I just thought the map should added to the collection at mAL for community review.

Sorries.

Although, something else to keep in mind: TWP and mAL have an alliance, With a big link to TWP on the mAL homepage.

One thing; I downloaded this 1-2 days before official release, so sometging may have changed since I ran it. . .

Very fun all the way around; it was all extremely inventive. I liked how everything was in the portal puzzle/level theme, and yet you got to step outside the typical portal level for a while.

Loved the piston puzzle; some nice inventive portal use there (at least I had to do something I've never had to do before!) I'd love to compare solutions sometime on this one; I have to wonder if what I did was what we were expected to do.

Getting across the chasm. . ..a good flinging puzzle and it made excellent use of stuff "just lying around". I liked how there were all these things present that MIGHT have been part of the solution (grates, etc) and I had to check-em all out. My only possible issue being that the [spoiler] portal-thru-portal[/spoiler] technique I did use to get my portals seems to almost REQUIRE a slo-mo mod; I tried without it and it resulted in 15-20 minutes of retries with an eventual success that I can only describe as "darn lucky". Maybe my reflexes are just not what they once were. . .or I did this in a non-expected way.

On the 3rd puzzle, I finally [spoiler]dismissed the tethered ball as irrelevant [/spoiler] and figured out a workable (but hard) fling. I worked with the ball for a while though and could see how it MIGHT be used (I see a spoiler that said they did it that way) but I judged that as simply too random/untrustworthy, because the tethered ball was VERY violent when disturbed. Maybe I was wrong; must go back and see.

My most memorable moments in this map were both excellent:

- Fooling around. . .made one portal for techered ball to fall into. . . then ran all the way back to grate near the 2nd puzzle end, and shooting the second portal down thru the grate into the room below. I stretched that energy line for a good 300 feet through walls and everything! And then noclip down to see the ball trapped in the upper corner of that room, vibrating wildly. I just had to laugh!

[spoiler]
- Me in the portal, having one portal covered by piston, and watching that last piston coming right at my nose. . .priceless.
[/spoiler]

Loved the map. Played the WIP of it, and couldn't get past the second chamber. Final release is much much better. Well done.

When I got to the "ball and chain" part, I quite litterally said "...What the *&!% is that?"

After about 3 or 4 minutes of screwing around (and killing myself once), I beat it the same way that Artesia described already.


Looking forward to future maps from you

Doesn't mean you should go posting your link around.

The signature is enough.

For every link he posts, I'll post 2 at his site!

nickworks is cool in my book.

it's truly official now.

We're cross-posting.

i like the map, though manny bugs.
and the goals of each puzzle where hard to figgure out.
try to avoid adding new gameplay if we hadent have a intruduction of it yet... example: i tried like 10 min's to get past those pistens, and then i discoverd i needed to go back i gave up.

exept those things i really liked it.

I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

Generally, it's chock-full of inventive, challenging puzzles. Great use of textures to create areas that look good and make sense in the game world.

I would love to hear a description (or see a .DEM) of how to get past the tetherball room with a fling.

Here's how I got through the map: [spoiler]First I spent way too long trying to fling to the passageway at the top of the broken lift. Then I noclipped up there and saw that it was a dead end. Only then did I search more thoroughly and realize you can go underneath the lift. Duh.

Loved the ball-catcher puzzle with the sideways pistons in the middle. It makes you use a technique I call "leapfrogging," where you place new portals to get to new areas while always leaving one end "anchored" because you know you'll have to use it again.

To do the fling in the room with stacked pallets, I portaled up to the highest square platform and shot a portal through the grate to the wall in the other room. Then I jumped back to the main platform where the pallets are stacked, which was really hard but possible. (I had to bunny-hop from the top platform to the one just a notch below it, bunny-hop again immediately and crouch in the air to make the landing. Then I placed a portal on the slanted surface, jumped through to the other room, put a portal on the floor and (sure enough) flung out of the 45-degree pallet up to the top of the room. Very difficult but satisfying!

And I did the tetherball the "approved" way. Used the cube to activate the lift, then used portals to make the tetherball knock the cube off the button, then more portals to move the cube to the other button.[/spoiler]

All this plus Challenge modes -- sweet. Great work, Shmitz!

In response to people saying they actually did something with the piston area:

[spoiler]I didn't actually use portals in that spot. My puny mind just said Hm... I bet if I time it right, I can run straight through. And I did.[/spoiler]

I never said I wasn't cool with him - but IMO advertising other sites shouldn't be appreciated.