Make portable room without being able to portal in it!

[LPChip]

Many people dislike it when you get a mostly black level with maybe here and there a white spot because it takes away the fun of using your portal gun.

Now, I really do understand the reason behind making your level mostly black, and that is to make it so that the player cannot just portal from one place to the other, to bypass your puzzle.

I've come up with a way to ensure that the player temporarily cannot use his portal gun. Well, technically speaking, he can, but then he won't be able to solve your puzzle.

The idea is this: somewhere in the level, setup a laser emitter and a catcher and make it so that you need to use portals to lit the catcher.

While the catcher is enabled, you then link the catcher to any element that requires a button press of some sort by you.

The good thing is, that the player can portal to any location in your map, but they will fail to put the mechanic into motion, which adds to the value of the level.

See this example:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/577/p2conceptnoportal.png

Note that I have used a pedestal button that remains always on for the sake of showing you the image from a different perspective. Normally you would want to use a weighted button in addition to whatever mechanic you want to use and make it so that the button goes to a laser (that can be invisible) with a relay and another laser that will maintain itself so you can be sure that you have to press that button, not a cube or anything else, but also that your end result will not stop until you get off, unless its a door and you can shoot a portal behind.

But how you fill the puzzle is entirely up to you of course.

I will be building a puzzle using this mechanic and I'll share it with everyone here in this very topic.

I invite you to share your puzzles IF they use this technique. So don't post your map if they aren't using this way to force the player to not use portals to finish that section. Just using black walls obviously is not good enough to link your post here. I will update this post with maps that I have verified to use this principle.

Levels featuring this idea:
- Currently none yet.

[robly18]

That's actually a brilliant idea...

If the player has to keep the portals there to actually complete the puzzle, they can't use said portals for anything else.

Nice.

[Alexander Bell]

OR you could put some effort in to the map and make only the panels that let you portal past everything black, or add doors, or add fizzlers...

[Stagger Lee]

Many people dislike it when you get a mostly black level with maybe here and there a white spot because it takes away the fun of using your portal gun.

Now, I really do understand the reason behind making your level mostly black, and that is to make it so that the player cannot just portal from one place to the other, to bypass your puzzle.

I've come up with a way to ensure that the player temporarily cannot use his portal gun. Well, technically speaking, he can, but then he won't be able to solve your puzzle.

The idea is this: somewhere in the level, setup a laser emitter and a catcher and make it so that you need to use portals to lit the catcher.

While the catcher is enabled, you then link the catcher to any element that requires a button press of some sort by you.

The good thing is, that the player can portal to any location in your map, but they will fail to put the mechanic into motion, which adds to the value of the level.

See this example:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/577/p2conceptnoportal.png

Note that I have used a pedestal button that remains always on for the sake of showing you the image from a different perspective. Normally you would want to use a weighted button in addition to whatever mechanic you want to use and make it so that the button goes to a laser (that can be invisible) with a relay and another laser that will maintain itself so you can be sure that you have to press that button, not a cube or anything else, but also that your end result will not stop until you get off, unless its a door and you can shoot a portal behind.

But how you fill the puzzle is entirely up to you of course.

I will be building a puzzle using this mechanic and I'll share it with everyone here in this very topic.

I invite you to share your puzzles IF they use this technique. So don't post your map if they aren't using this way to force the player to not use portals to finish that section. Just using black walls obviously is not good enough to link your post here. I will update this post with maps that I have verified to use this principle.

Levels featuring this idea:
- Currently none yet.


This is stuff more people should read.

[agusganog]

Limiting portal placement without making unportalable surfaces is something I've been working on for a while. I can think of some other ways to limit portal placement and create maps that allow many portalable surfaces. Note: these maps do not use the concept you illustrated (but something roughly equivalent), so if you do not feel like adding them there are no hard feelings :p

For example, my map Marathon (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=77625577) tasks the player with a seemingly simple problem that ends up requiring very clever portal tactics (Relay (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=78633280) is a harder map that builds on this concept). Another method for portal restriction is my map Laser Riddles (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=79123805) in which the first "riddle" involves clever use of portals (in fact, no one except me has been able to solve this without help. not saying its hard, just seemingly impossible without the right mindset).

[LPChip]

I'm not going to add them. I want maps that follow this principle. Which is: There's an area that you normally want to portal to. There's an alternate way to come there, but its much harder/requires work. You have to somehow have your portals in use for something else while getting to that location.

I hope to stimulate people make this kind of map just so they can share it in this topic. :) For that reason, I'm not going to add maps that do something else.