Hello Test subjects!

A new portal mod has popped onto Steam Greenlight this week: "Portal: Outside Influence".

Quote:
Outside Influence is a mod for the original Portal; a new story set within the shared Half-Life/Portal universe, with new testing elements, environments and music. Contains additional features, such as fully voiced audio logs that tell the stories of those who worked at Aperture Science in its last days, a togglable hint system and a zoom scope a la Portal 2.

Check out the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LaEwV2_6yQ

and head over to the greenlight page to vote!

There's been a lot of really good Portal and Portal 2 mods popping onto Greenlight recently, I'm excited :D

On the /r/portal thread, the developer said it's been worked on for over 5 years! Hope it pays off for them.

Thanks for posting about the campaign! The level of support has been incredible thus far, and I'm super hopeful for the future of the project!

I heard you got Jim Sterling to do VA for this. I'm really looking forward to that. Is he going to be the antagonist?
Edit: Actually never mind. I'll let it be a surprise.

Yes! We've got a pretty big voice cast - Jim Sterling, Conrad Zimmerman (who is also acting as script editor), Jonathan Holmes, Cody Powell, Clint of LazyGameReviews, and a bunch more folks who I've followed work of in the past. I've got a few more to ask yet, and a couple that have yet to reply (though I was perhaps a tad optimistic in asking Marc Leblanc and Warren Spector, but I thought I'd give it a go )

Oh, and if you're wondering why there's such a large cast, the game features audio-logs. Yes, I played System Shock in the past year, can you tell?

Holy shit, all 3 dismal jesters? You got my vote. Why isn't this info on the greenlight page?

Honestly? I wanted to see how far it could get without leveraging the name-power. We're very nearly in the top 100 even though it's not been featured on a single major games site - TWP is the only site to have done so, as far as I can tell. Word of mouth has gotten us pretty damn far.

I plan on sticking up an announcement about the voice cast later this week, however.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbzGLdiICk4

Thanks so much to everyone who voted and shared it around!

GRATS man!

woo awesome
congratulations! If you ever need help with the steam things, feel free to hit me up!

That'd be great actually! I've gotta get my business bank account set up before I can continue with Greenlight, but I'll likely need all the help I can get with anything past that.

Congrats on the greenlight!
Great to see that the original Portal is still getting some love

Thanks! I've often thought about switching to Portal 2, but I want to force myself to avoid some of the pitfalls of Portal 2's design (big empty cavernous areas with boxes in, relying on dynamic lighting etc.). Simply using the older engine is the easiest way of doing that, really.

I don't know whats the problem here. Just by using Portal 2 you don't have to change the whole design of your levels. You just have advantages of more people having Portal 2 than Portal 1 (I guess) and additional testing elements.
The only downside are a few Portal 1 testing elements which are partially missing. But I more or less converted them all into Portal 2:
Energy Balls http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=10
Light Beam Platforms http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=15
Rocket Sentry turrets http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=13

I think another issue that could arise with using portal 2 is the lack of hl2 specific entities

SpAM_CAN wrote:
Yes! We've got a pretty big voice cast - Jim Sterling, Conrad Zimmerman (who is also acting as script editor), Jonathan Holmes, Cody Powell, Clint of LazyGameReviews, and a bunch more folks who I've followed work of in the past. I've got a few more to ask yet, and a couple that have yet to reply (though I was perhaps a tad optimistic in asking Marc Leblanc and Warren Spector, but I thought I'd give it a go )

Oh, and if you're wondering why there's such a large cast, the game features audio-logs. Yes, I played System Shock in the past year, can you tell?

Jim Sterling WTF??? I don't know the other names, but...wow, just wow.

Skotty wrote:
I don't know whats the problem here. Just by using Portal 2 you don't have to change the whole design of your levels. You just have advantages of more people having Portal 2 than Portal 1 (I guess) and additional testing elements.
The only downside are a few Portal 1 testing elements which are partially missing. But I more or less converted them all into Portal 2:
Energy Balls http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=10
Light Beam Platforms http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=15
Rocket Sentry turrets http://erikszeug.de/?p=downloads&download=13

That's exactly the thing though - if those features are available to me, I'll end up using them, and I want to keep this as much like the original as possible. There's a whole heap of other things I dislike about Portal 2 too, from the limited air movement, to the instantaneous portal placement, to the way walking feels strangely sticky, and the loss of momentum when exiting portals at certain angles - all of these things I am unable to do anything about, and would require a fair amount of tweaking to the level design to accommodate (plus the change in momentum rules would force me to cut the part where you can drop-kick a turret through a portal, which is ludicrously satisfying ). Volume 2 is planned to make use of Portal 2, but that is likely years off.

Plus we're using a bunch of HL2 entities, and I'm not well versed enough in VScript to write alternatives.

(apologies for the late reply, been a tad busy with uni assignments for the past month)