This is my first go at mapping a portal 2 map,

any feedback welcome.

(few missed dev texture which i am aware of)

End of map is when you get confetti..

File Name: buksh.rar
File Size: 2.78 MiB
Click here to download Buksh Map

Ohhh this was painful. So many needless deaths. Does Buksh mean Chambers of Death in your native language?

More constructively:
Room One: I generally dislike timed events because its often just a cheap way of making something easy to do difficult. And this is a perfect example of that. Why make the fizzlers almost exactly a cube-width apart? Give the player a chance at least.

Room Two: Nothing in this room that is portable looks portable. And you need to force the portal to center itself, because too often I would just barely miss and get stuck out there or get tossed into the drink.

Room Three: Why don't you allow the player to escape the turrets? It just seemed like needless punishment for making a wrong guess.

This map has a lot of frustration factors built into it. The puzzles are more a matter of figuring how not to kill yourself again.

Thanks for the feedback RogerL

I thought that centring the portal might be an option but wasnt sure how to do it to be honest!

I will bare that in mind next time.

I was thinkign about making a way to escape the portals but then i wanted to do something different..than the usual portal challenge and suppose i added the deaths to make it that , just to keep it so a room would have to be completed as a sequence i.e step 1,2 then 3.

I may look into making a map which is purely puzzles though!

appreciate the feedback.

after about 10 attempts at the first room I quit.. not that it was too hard, just that the concept presented was so simple, and the solution so apparent, but the execution was so precise that it took away the fun. when I realized what was going on I figured the rest of the map was just as poorly constructed and not worth the time to invest in continuing...

Lol, this was my first map so i wasnt sure of the difficulty.

When testing i can do the entire map in under 2 minutes. so i was worried it was too easy!

It is quite obvious this is a first map. That's not a problem, my first map is far from perfect too.

Some thing I noticed:
The light wasn't very good, there were a lot of dark spaces, it is very useful to use light instances for proper lighting.
There are a lot of textures that are only visible half, that's odd
The first puzzle was very very hard, timing was extremely tight.
When I entered the orange gel-fizzler room puzzle I thought that there would be hard light bridges instead of fizzlers. Search the model browser for fizzler and use one of those models.

Fling puzzle:
The surface that rolls in when you press the button is pitch black. This is due to how lighting is calculated in hammer. It is calculated how the objects are in hammer, moving them doesn't change the light. To fix this: make sure the surface is opened at map start, and then use a logic_auto with OnMapSpawn surface: close 0.00. This way people won't see it was open but the lighting is fixed.
I couldn't finish this map I had to enable sv_cheats 1 and sv_allow_mobile_portals 1. Or is this also a very very very very very tight timing?
The second fling: the portalble surface here looks grey. That doesn't feel like portable.

fling room:
Looks a bit big.
portal_placement_helpers would help a lot here!

Maze:
getting stuck without a warning and being killed by turrets isn't fun

Some good feedback lpfreaky90

yeh i couldnt get the light right to be honest.. not sure why i will have to have a play around.

I couldnt figure out why the moving platforms were so dark i tried everything :S thought it might have been to do with the brush rending shadows e.t.c

Fling puzzle is just timing, if you press the button on the way up it clicks in place at the right time.

Thanks for your feed back,best so far.

I had no idea on the difficulty of the map to be honest,i thought it was easy :S

This is a good map. It's not too hard. It just takes a few tries. I'm guessing you got that turret maze idea from me? Nothing wrong with that. It just reminded me of the one I did.

Hi thanks, glad you liked it! I didnt think it was too hard.

No sorry i didnt know youd done a maze map. I thought up all my puzzles away from comp in the gym lol

Il have to check yours out,i had a few more ideas like crumble floors but didnt bother putting them in.

Buksh wrote:
Hi thanks, glad you liked it! I didnt think it was too hard.

No sorry i didnt know youd done a maze map. I thought up all my puzzles away from comp in the gym lol

Il have to check yours out,i had a few more ideas like crumble floors but didnt bother putting them in.

I also build a maze a long time ago, this also included crumbling floors. I asked some people to playtest it. The conclusion ALWAYS was that it was fun but that crumbling floors completely flip out people. Any form of orientation is lost. Specially if you use the same textures for your entire maze people won't even recognize the place where that panel crumbled. Thereby doing the same part like 3-4 times. This is getting boring and just a game of luck, guessing the correct way to go to the exit. The people I asked all wanted to solve a maze by using their orientation and points that can be recognized.
That is why world portals in a maze are the worst idea ever.

What I would like in a maze map:
* Points of recognition: walking the same round over and over again gets boring. (though with a proper strategy for a maze you won't do this)
* Tiny puzzles: hey, there's water here, I can't cross it, but hey, there's a funnel over there, so I can actually cross that water. Those kinds of things.
* A real, clear goal, like an elevator or another part of your map.
* NO WAYS TO GET STUCK/DIE.

Anyways, that's just my two cents

This map is just horrible. The leveldesign could not be much worse. I don't think I need to explain much, any working human brain should see the issues.

Here is my blindrun of this map:

YNYGdjUyHLQ
(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNYGdjUyHLQ)

Awesome feed back and welcome to the forum from you Djinndrache,

you've given me lots that i can work on to improve from my first map.

Appreciate the post!

This map is a juvenile, broken, reflex test. 2/5, remove from playlist.

First rule of map testing: don't do it yourself once you've got it "working".

Gel slide: I dock you one rating point for tight timing, which made a decent puzzle a chore.
Vertical fling: panel over faithplate stuck closed. I dock you another point for tight timing, I failed to hit the portals beneath me because they weren't closing soon enough. Fix the lighting and make the floor portals white.
Lateral fling: you need alignment helpers. I missed the second faithplate repeatedly because I was squirting sideways out of the portal. Lpfreaky90 has already given you advice on fixing the terrible lighting. I give you one point back because the timing is reasonable here.
Maze: The most juvenile part of all. Death due to mistakes is OK by me, but death due to unavoidable choices is not.

My overall impression is this has good ideas ruined by poor design, construction, lighting and sense of what a first-time player will experience. Grow up, or get some playtesters that are grownups.

EDIT: When Djinndrache says a map is horrible, you have a very serious problem. If I were you, I would take him up on his offer to be a playtester.