Over the course of the past several days, I’ve been working on a series of puzzles for another Portal 2 map. I had what I thought was an exceedingly clever idea for a mechanic to work a puzzle around, so I got to work right away fleshing it out from the ground up.
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| I began on paper. |
With a little bit of elbow grease and some colored lighting, I have successfully designed a puzzle.
| In all her glory. I can’t get that potato off the Portal Device, but whatever. |
Having learned my lesson about slap-dash level design from my previous failure, I decided to be very careful and efficient when designing this one, but I was also able to retain some of the ideas that I liked from that puzzle. I began by making the following chart:
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Switches
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Controlled Items
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Tools
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Floor Switch 01
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Angled Panel
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Floor Switch 02
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Emancipation Grid
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Discouragement Beam
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Chamber Door
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Button
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Cube Dropper
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Cube
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Excursion Funnel
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As I sought out temporary avenues to practice game design without a team of programmers and artists, I suddenly remembered that all Valve games come with the development tools to make mods and custom levels. Feeling emboldened by the amazing entries in Valve’s official mod contest for Portal 2 (a delightfully vexing puzzle game with a simple rule set and some dastardly challenges), I set out to learn to use the tools and practice level design. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
While browsing the super helpful wiki on the subject, I came across a couple of schools of thought for level design. One method for designing a Portal puzzle is to use a chart to plot out the various states you want the puzzle to go through before you complete it. This can help you design a puzzle before you really have a vision of what it’s going to be. For example…
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Emancipation Grid | On | On | Off | Off |
| Floor Button | Unpressed | Unpressed | Pressed | Cube’d |
| Storage Cube | Hidden | Out of reach | Obtained | On button |
| Small Button | Pressed | Cube dispensed | x | x |
| Chamber Door | Closed | Closed | Closed | Open |
This is a simple 4 step puzzle that I designed as a basic way to get started. I selected the elements that I wanted in my puzzle first, and then decided what they should be used for and when they should be used. Apart from knowing what each button actually controlled, I didn’t really have any kind of concrete image in my head of what the puzzle would be at this time. But this simple chart gave me a foundation to work from. I ended up with a puzzle that looked like this:
| Prolonged exposure to the button! |
