[Coop] Evolution #01

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Cau3T
18 Posts
Posted Jul 21, 2011
Replied 34 minutes later
There will be other maps. But I have a little more difficulty to find a hard concept for funnels...
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xdiesp
1,078 Posts
Posted Jul 21, 2011
Replied 7 hours later

Cau3T wrote:
I have a little more difficulty to find a hard concept for funnels...

Novel uses of funnels that I remember... "Electrophobia" had 2 white walls facing each other, where one of the players had to keep alternating a funnel to keep a gel blob suspended in between. "It's different" had 2 funnels side by side, and players had to swim in both to avoid obstacles\fizzlers.

Mazes to remotely control a cube in are very popular, generally vertical (unfunnel and the ball falls to its death) if not in rare cases such as "Absolutism" where it's in plain under the grid floor. A few others had funneled items hit a series of triggers on the fly, so the player could pass through several portcullis (i.e. "CG-Oversized Test Chamber Storage Area").

There's also frequent use of funnels in worldportals puzzles, to keep the player stable while the room "rotates". There the funnel is just a way of presentation, you could still innovate on that - I can immagine another "Time Arch" with a funnel going back and forth in different ages.

Something never tried yet in the remote+maze subgenre, is to manage a complex puzzle by controlling several items: generally, it's just one cube being lead all the way and then it stops. That could work as a big mechanism with different final states into it. Alternatively, funnels on moving panels as the laser in the neurotoxin chamber.

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Cau3T
18 Posts
Posted Jul 22, 2011
Replied 9 hours later
Thanks for advices.

I already built the first room of the second map, but your advices will help me to build the second room.

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shawy89
74 Posts
Posted Aug 16, 2011
Replied 25 days later
927 people have downloaded this map. Of all those people, I'd love to know how many have actually managed to FINISH this map!

Me and my co-op parter spent a good hour on this until finally had to admit defeat. We had to give up.

Chamber 1 was nice, pretty easy, we did that in under 10 minutes. Now, the 2nd one... let me put it this way: that is the single most difficult chamber I have ever played in Portal 2! We even watched the video walkthrough and still got mixed up what to do.

The difficultly of this map is brutal. Perhaps too difficult, only for hardcore players.

We actually managed to get both cube in the start. I recommend not having the second cube on a portalable surface. I placed a portal, then placed another next to the lower panels, walked through to my death but shot under the cube. So we actually used 2 cubes to get it into the receiver which controls the lower panels.

This is probably the first map me and my parter have completely given up on. So congrats on that. We have taken a sneak peak at how to do certain parts here and there, but never before has a map defeated us so brutally.

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macko68
65 Posts
Posted Feb 19, 2012
Replied 6 months later
Cau3T first I need to say that the harder the map the better for me. Yesterday I played this gem along with my friend and I must say that your map is in second position in my private ranking of coop maps. The second part is simply brilliant. I love the design and how you can move around the map. Its very logic, provoking, without any bugs. I admire that its the puzzle not execution that is the most challenging. I took us 1 hour to solve. Maybe its not as hard as complexo which is my number one but still can give you some moments of "whats next ?". I`m eagerly awiating for your next release. Please make it as hard as possible as so far none of coop maps beat us yet. Many, many thanks for this one ! Coop maps need your input
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KennKong
942 Posts
Posted Mar 08, 2012
Replied 17 days later
Redunzl and I spent 2.5 hours solving this beauty of a puzzle. While we screwed up and around a lot, ultimately our solution was simpler to execute, if with a somewhat larger number of steps. Unfortunately, it's too late for us to record a playthrough to show some different approaches to different areas.

Room 1: We didn't bother trying to time the catch of the cube. Redunzl landed on top of the cube dropper on the second try. We liked your vertical laser to the second cube, but we did it by portaling low on the source and high on the destination panels at which the lasers are aimed. This unintended(?) solution is easily fixed by a couple info_placement_helpers.

Room 2: We used a much more complicated 4 portal solution to hit the 2 dot target. Your way would have saved us a solid half-hour of tweaking. We didn't switch the upper laser from one bridge to the next. We didn't use any speed or accuracy moves anywhere.

We also didn't use the room behind the 3 and 4 dot target room. We tried so many different things that by the time the solution dawned on us, we can't honestly say if our way was easier on not. It did use one trick, jumping on a cube to get through a portal too high to jump through from the floor. Maybe next week we'll play it again and record it, so you can see for yourself.

The lights were too bright in the two dot room. We couldn't even see where the laser was hitting the walls.

I think the early negative responses may have scared away a lot of people. This map is not hard, it's sophisticated. The path to victory is long, but not difficult. This map is for thinkers, not ninjas. This map deserves some love, people! 4/5 from us.

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Cau3T
18 Posts
Posted Mar 08, 2012
Replied 3 hours later
Thanks for commments.

For the light, it's probably due to a bad compilation with HDR lights. Maybe it's better wihtout the HDR option (video options).

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KennKong
942 Posts
Posted Mar 15, 2012
Replied 6 days later
After making fairly short work of Evolution #2 tonight, we decided to go back and record a playthrough of this map to illustrate the points we made in our prior post. While we remembered some lessons learned last week, this video takes 27+ 21+ minutes because it was only our second time playing the map. EDIT: I edited out about 6 minutes of dead air. Also, in a video this long, Fraps has some serious audio sync problems.

Evolution #1Evolution #1
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Suggestions if you want to prevent some parts of our solution. If the 2 dot laser were higher, we couldn't hop on the cube to get back to the 3 dot room. Move the fizzler in the 2 dot room right to the edge. Cut off the ends of the portal surfaces along the sides of the top bridge so we don't have that angle to the 4 dot target.

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That Greek Guy
124 Posts
Posted Mar 24, 2012
Replied 9 days later
This map is AWESOME. A very good test with perfect indicators and very clear objective. Its very hard but it never keeps you wondering wtf do i have to do (assuming you are thinking hard though). I played it with Gig and we solved it with great cooperation and when we reached the exit it was like a brain orgasm. I didn't have this fun with a hard puzzle in months.
This map is like the opposite of Puffin in my opinion. Puffin had a clever challenge but horrible indication. It was very clever but extremely frustrating, with horrible indicators and signs and torturous backtracking upon failure. This is just PERFECT.