Hey guys, let me bounce this idea off you. The more I play Portal, especially some of these wicked hard custom maps, the more I realize that my FPS reflexes/shooting skills have totally deteriorated from their former glory.

So I thought it would be cool to make a map for practicing different flinging techniques and just generally screwing around. I think of it like a skate park: a big open area with lots of interesting terrain rather than obstacles. The way I imagine it, it would have lots of ramps and platforms, and a few buttons which would move or tilt panels different ways. These would serve as player-adopted mini-goals, since the level imposes no goals of its own.

So you'd load it up and like, try to get a handle on what happens if you're doing a fling and turn 180 degrees right before you go into the floor portal for the second time, and try to figure out if that opens up any new maneuvers. With this practice goal in mind, you could hop around and kind of set up a good area to do the test you want, maybe hit a switch to turn a panel from vertical to 45 degrees, and then you try it out.

Is this making sense?

Kind of along the same lines I was also thinking of making a combat practice room with user-activated panels that would open to reveal as few or as many turrets as they wanted to fight at once. Kind of like the X-Men's Danger Room.

What do you guys think?

Well it would be ok, but only in the same way a shooting range would be ok for HL2.

you would have to at least propmt players to sucseed, by say, unlocking the next bit of the 'portal park' only once they manage one bit of it, which i guess makes it more like a normal map.

I've used a couple of the released maps for that purpose lol. I love the idea, I could spend hours just flinging around with no goal in mind. If anyone has played Skate for the 360, they understand how much fun it can be to just roam and just screw around.

youme wrote:
Well it would be ok, but only in the same way a shooting range would be ok for HL2.

you would have to at least propmt players to sucseed, by say, unlocking the next bit of the 'portal park' only once they manage one bit of it, which i guess makes it more like a normal map.

Let me add to that.

If you have a say room, that is there for you to practice your flinging technique, make it so you must do a quite difficult fling to get over to the next area of training. Just so the player can adapt and learn to the fullest percent the skill they're testing out. In the case they get lucky, make them have to commit the skill twice to pass over in something called a "connector".

.........................................................|......................................|........
[TRAINING ROOM 1] \ FLING |[CONNECTOR] \ |[NEW SKILL]

I'll make a suggestion...

a skate park to screw around in, at the end of the map, might be a nice way to end the map

when you get there, display a victory message, and welcome them to the portal skate park

OMG. That's perfect.

"Welcome to Portal Theme Park"

Teleport your self to the top, get on a rollercoaster and have a sweet ride down to an elevator. D:

yeah it could be kinda like what they have at the end of conc or surf maps... ive never played those...

Maybe if you are doing this, it might be an option to have a one-way door
so in case they DO complete a certain portion by luck and aren't yet
fully comfortable with it, make the door not let them through from the
side they practice on, but in case they complete it, let them walk back
in.

i dunno, just a thought considering the whole achievement side of the map.

I think it would be cool to have stuff like obstacles to play with. for instance, a big ring/tube that the player can fling through, tunnels, and stuff to show off their skills. They could create "combos" of certain moves.

Something I sketched out...

I wish I could sketch as good as you.....

Is that a digital sketch?

Grudge wrote:
Is that a digital sketch?

Yeah, I have a Wacom tablet.

Guitar wrote:
Yeah, I have a Wacom tablet.

It's beautiful ;D

Woah, I didn't think the idea was cool until I saw your sketch. Now I want to play it. Just looks like a fun place to mess around.

Guitar gets it! That's exactly the idea. Lots of interesting stuff to go over/around/through/whatever, but just to challenge yourself to pull off more complicated maneuvers, not as a path through a puzzle chamber from beginning to end.

The thing is, with most maps once you've "solved" it, you're probably not going to play it again. A good portal park, on the other hand, could keep you entertained for hours if it had enough widgets & cool terrain.

It's the difference between an obstacle course and a playground. On the obstacle course, you step through the tires on the ground and climb the rope net and cross a ditch hand-over-hand on a horizontal ladder. But you could take those same elements and arrange them differently to create a playground, where you can go play on the monkey bars, or go swing on the swing, whatever you feel like doing at the moment.

I think this could be an awesome map with the slow motion mod.

w00t! I'm happy someone else has the same type of idea as me.

So, has anyone tried to make said maptype? I was going to start on one for personal use lately, but I haven't had the time.

Im going to try to make one when the SDK comes out.

that's "if" the sdk comes out... I've given up hope

Yeah really. I love Valve and all, but they really should have planned ahead better. They release this totally brilliant game that's 3 hours long and they don't have the SDK waiting in the wings?

Edit: Crytek included their map editor in the demo for Crysis, for Christ's sake.