Aperture Valentine

Aperture Valentine's workshop

These are the chambers considered as slightly tougher than the rest and that we decided to release separately in order to keep a difficulty level that makes the main map enjoyable for everyone!

There are 2 main chambers mostly drowned in water and designed to make both players think and plan their movements...

In the first chamber both players are completely separated in 2 different areas; once you get through it, you'll join forces to face the 2nd chamber altogether.

All puzzles are focussed in portal placement and reuse of portals ratber than skill-based puzzles. It is intended to be challenging although not too hard.

Hope you enjoy it!

Feedback is much appreciated.

CREDITS

• Skybox by Komaock
• Levers system taken from an example by NocturnalGhost

(for the rest of custom elements used in this map, credits and thanks visit the Aperture Valentine main course workshop place or the thread at Thinkingwithportals.com)

CHANGELOG

• v1.1: prevented using the wall_projector prop to solve the puzzle in chamber 2 (thanks zivi7). Added some more details, lighting changes, added areaportals to prevent watching the players' droppers falling hole through the skybox

• v1.2: changed the layout for the final puzzle in 2nd chamber to force the intended solution ;D

• v1.3: introduced some changes to prevent some unintended moves in 2nd chamber; hopefully now the intended solution is the only one possible

Click here to download Aperture Valentine - The advanced chambers

Click here to download Aperture Valentine - The advanced chambers

Replacing one portal in the wrong way can ruin everything here so we noclipped a lot to go back to previous portal setups. I think that's alright since you can't autosave in Coop like you have to in your Singleplayer Maps.

We had a lot of fun trying to figure it out, it's a great addition to the easy Valentine course if you hunger for tougher puzzles.

zivi7 wrote:
I had only played the first chamber so far. Just finished the second one with Mumbles. There was one step where we weren't sure if it was intended: Standing on the lightbridge prop to not fall down.

Well, of course not It's easy to fix though by displacing the prop into the wall some bits. I'll also put player clips around that bridge signage, thanks for pointing out

zivi7 wrote:
Replacing one portal in the wrong way can ruin everything here so we noclipped a lot to go back to previous portal setups. I think that's alright since you can't autosave in Coop like you have to in your Singleplayer Maps.

Yeah, even though I loved the experience thinking with 4 portals plus the players positions to design these puzzles, I guess tough puzzles are better for singleplayer where you can make use of savegames.

zivi7 wrote:
We had a lot of fun trying to figure it out, it's a great addition to the easy Valentine course if you hunger for tougher puzzles.

Thank you so much for your input mate, and thank you very much for helping me debugging that annoying crash in this chamber!

npc_msleeper_boss wrote:
That is kind of obnoxiously red.

Heh, thanks for the feedback sleeper, I'm sorry you didn't like it. The truth is that in the beginning, when we were trying different approaches for the Valentine's day themed map and thought of all the clich? around this day, we thought that there were not many colours to choose from to make custom textures, basically pink or red I think red is a better option; about this specific red, are you saying it's kind of obnoxious from those pictures or did you actually play it? cause I think they look better in game

But, no, I haven't played it yet. Me and wstrika are probably gonna do these on DWP.

npc_msleeper_boss wrote:
But, no, I haven't played it yet. Me and wstrika are probably gonna do these on DWP.

Really? that would be awesome! I hope you won't get too drunk though in order to solve it

I hope to get your feedback about lighting / red textures after playing; I recheck and it's good in game... soft and not annoying.

I love Portal and want to collect some gameplays (first blind runs; always aren't the fastest and intended solutions, because I take any time to look at the map and its possibilities), speedruns and bug reports.
My records should help you to understand how the player thinks.
Well, I hope I can support you with my uploads to fix any bugs and make new awesome maps.

Here are yours!

Gameplay Part 1:* http://youtu.be/Qtg7mCorXsE
Gameplay Part 2:* http://youtu.be/IBRHHQ-XDz4

If you like it and/or it helps: THUMBS UP

opinion & comments: we love it!
awesome design, I envy your skills and puzzle ideas.

As always: Thank you all for mapping...

Keep it up!

Thank you so much for playing my map and for the super-nice comments!

I enjoyed a lot watching the gameplay, and it was funny at some parts too! My only complaint is that you ended up breaking your solution for chamber 1 because of noclipping! You almost had it but all of a sudden you (or your partner) went and re-placed the portal in front of the laser_catcher that opens the exit doors and simply flew outside! You already knew that it is not possible to get out from that area so easy because you already failed at reaching the slanted edge... so you cheated There's a way for setting up the portals correctly and finally do as you did, stacking the cubes and using the initial white wall (that is totally intended) So I encourage you to replay that part in order to do correctly, you almost had it!

And for the second chamber, I already realized some days ago that the very last part can be solved in many different unintended ways... so I was working on a change in the layout, but unfortunately you played before I had the time to update the map... SOOO... the update is ready. I'll update the map later today to v1.2... and I'd urge you to replay it if you liked the challenge, because chamber 2 was intended to be more challenging obviously Btw, the first part of 2nd chamber, even though you performed a lot of unnecesary flings, you did it intendedly

Thanks again for playing it!

Sorry for the dumb noclip action ...I was tired and we didn't want to make all steps again.
The record shows always my own view. Later when we (me and SalzStreuer) make a perfect commentary of each played map, we upload both views on the respective youtube channel.

Thanks again!

PS: I'm so envious of your and LpFreakys, Zivi7s, Mevious', Sicklebricks skill. Nice work guys, ...and this applies not only to this map!

I took the chance to increase the time in the column timer after being asked to, since the intention is not much a timing puzzle than logical one. I only established that tight time in order to avoid a possible exploit of the final solution.

The map is an amazing combination of logic.
Room 1 might be a bit overwhelming at first but the indicators are clear; the colors help to distinguish between the different ones and the numbers are also very helpful. The timer in the first room is also much better now than it was before, it's really a part of the puzzle, not a timed puzzle anymore!

As for part 2: WOW! Careful planning, careful thinking will finally get you to the intended solution. The second puzzle is absolutely amongst my favorite coop puzzles of all time. Amazing =D
6/5

Edit: sorry for the low framerate and quality on the video; I was experiencing some problems with portal

Me and Lp solved science, well lp did and I am just awesome at following instructions

Pretty much mostly legitimate, except for a few noclips and a cube spawn

6/5 like lp

I enjoyed the video much, even the first part with that terrible lag. It's strange that though, and due to Lp's comment when you were about to leave ther airlock room (the areaportals should close now and hopefully the lag will be reduced... or something like that ), I'd like to say that of course there are areaportals in both exit doors, and they are closed on map's spawn, and all the time through, exacept when you open them hitting the final laser_catcher. I'll take a look to the optimisation in that room anyway, but you know, it's really difficult to do much more due to the open area it is...

Ha! about solution for 2nd chamber well, it needs yet another tweak to force my real intended way! But the intended one needs all of your moves though (momentum, portal replacement, much logic, cooperation and flinging!)

Let nme think over it (and have the time), and I'll release an update for it.

Thank you so much again for the feedback, and the awesome comments and rating!

Cheers!

EDIT

Version 1.3 is up now. I hope you try at least chamber 2 and try a solution for it Feedback is much appreciated!

Only time we had to use sv_cheat was to suicide blue when he got stuck inside where you are supposed to point the laser in the first chamber and orange was not in a position to reverse the gravity field. We accidentally killed the cube a few times but when we knew how to get it, it was really smooth to get the cube again so no need for noclip since it was not that much of backtracking.

Vislike wrote:
Just finished this map with my coop partner and i must say this is one of the, if not the best map we have played so far. Really great work with the map, was really fun to figure it all out.

Thank you so much for your words!! I'm happy to hear that you enjoyed it that much! But I'm even happier to know that ppl keep playing it still

Vislike wrote:
Only time we had to use sv_cheat was to suicide blue when he got stuck inside where you are supposed to point the laser in the first chamber and orange was not in a position to reverse the gravity field.

Oh, thanks for pointing that out, you are the first one to mention this, so I'll have to take a look into that asap!

Thanks for your feedback! I really appreciate it! Cheers!