Gear Portal map pack V2

downloading!

looks really nice gonna download it later

Damn, so many cool map packs to play, so little free time to do it!

just tried it out, and honestly, i'm not impressed. while the visuals are good (although not canon), the puzzles set the bar way too high in difficulty. i had a hard time figuring out what to do in some puzzles, and later on how to speed it up so you could make it within the required timespan. Add to that the numerous places you could get physically stuck, where i had to use noclip to be able to move. for the low gravity parts, you are offered no step by step tutorial on how it works other than simply watching how cubes float on a plane through a window. i also had a bug when trying out said low gravity chambers and i accidentally slipped a cube over some of that toxic waste. while i just watched the cube drift away, i realized there was no way i could get another cube from the hatch unless the first one was destroyed.

for the sake of my mental health i decided to put off trying any more than the first two levels for good. i could give you a ton of examples where the linear progression jumps up and down to the point where you'll be stuck in awe because the rooms were too complex. or that the autosaves are too far inbetween. or that there is no sense of direction/goal in the levels i tried.

if your target audience were japanese nerds a la asshole mario (

), then you've hit the nail on the head. otherwise, find some testers and reshape this; too buggy, too complex, too difficult. i can't recommend anyone trying this out unless you have a wish for a temporary mental decapitation with a sideorder of frustration.

I tried it out the other day and I kinda liked it.

Don't agree that the puzzles were too complex, however there were some bugs I discovered and one of them was really irritating meaning I couldn't finish one of the puzzles... I tried for over 20 min before redoing the whole room and this time it worked as it should have. It was one of the button controllable platforms that got stuck when it should have been folded into the wall again.

Quote from Sentura

just tried it out, and honestly, i'm not impressed. while the visuals are good (although not canon), the puzzles set the bar way too high in difficulty. i had a hard time figuring out what to do in some puzzles, and later on how to speed it up so you could make it within the required timespan. Add to that the numerous places you could get physically stuck, where i had to use noclip to be able to move. for the low gravity parts, you are offered no step by step tutorial on how it works other than simply watching how cubes float on a plane through a window. i also had a bug when trying out said low gravity chambers and i accidentally slipped a cube over some of that toxic waste. while i just watched the cube drift away, i realized there was no way i could get another cube from the hatch unless the first one was destroyed.for the sake of my mental health i decided to put off trying any more than the first two levels for good. i could give you a ton of examples where the linear progression jumps up and down to the point where you'll be stuck in awe because the rooms were too complex. or that the autosaves are too far inbetween. or that there is no sense of direction/goal in the levels i tried.

if your target audience were japanese nerds a la asshole mario (

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), then you've hit the nail on the head. otherwise, find some testers and reshape this; too buggy, too complex, too difficult. i can't recommend anyone trying this out unless you have a wish for a temporary mental decapitation with a sideorder of frustration.

Sorry you didn't Like it that much, we tried alot on it, but at the end we had an issue where we had so much that we had to break the map into two, which was the biggest contributor to breaking the Linear feeling. Yet we had designed the area in map 3 to be very non Linear, and allow the player to choose any room they would like to complete first.

Seems like Non-Linearity is something most people don't like anymore...

So with that the Initial gravity isn't at all hard to understand, I think when I hear the word gravity, it means it makes you flaot in some direction, and usally upwards, but I suppose that transition didn't work all that well within Portal. Much like a feature, this is something that is extremely new to Portal, and it's never been done, so as much as we designed it, we aren't yet masters at it, and therefore we're still working around alot of what we can do with it, and what we can't.

As too the Japanese people, I'm not sure where you got that from... It's not that we Don't like them, it's just odd that you would state that as a Goal for us lol. But yes I do admit that gravity from Mario galaxy was something that also did factor this feature, because I found Mario Galaxy so damn awesome, But if you hate it then you can't really add anything on that side since you would hate it.

But thanks though, I'm hoping myself to get through much of these bugs this week, and then release a patch with challenges included, and yes that means more difficulty, yet at the same time because were modders, we can make it as hard as we want, but not un-Defeatable that's for sure.

Also it would of been a bit helpful where you found the bugs, and what you ran into. Thanks. You did mention one though yes, and that I never really noticed in playtesting. Mainly cause no one ever threw their block in that room, nor could they ever get it down there.... so thats really odd.

Also that video was pretty funny, yet I see no comparison as to the difficulty in the map. We never had strict deaths in this one. I feel like we had more of that in map 1 then anything.

Indeed it does.

i realize my post sounded a bit harsh; please bear with me, i wrote it in frustration.

i dont think the gravity is as much an issue; it could be done with a simple step by step tutorial where you dedicate a few puzzle rooms so that the player can familiarize itself with the concept, much like in the original portal had a good learning curve for all new abilities/features. the biggest issue i see is the non linearity, which completely threw me off. the monotony of the standard portal textures mixed together with little or no direction is like a fully fledged maze, moreso than what you would probably expect. there is no mention of non linearity anywhere, so people would expect that there is only one way, because that's what they've seen in the original portal.

adding hints and tips could go a long way here, both for puzzles and visual hints towards that the player is free to pick any given room, rather than just showing them multiple entrances. even non linearity requires at least the notion that the player is free to go and do whatever he wants.

the part on the japanese people was a jesting jab. as seen in asshole mario and generally in many japanese games, the difficulty is very high, and the learning curve is steep.

I downloaded it but just played a few minutes.

That part I played was really nice

I think I will continue playing this evening

Further comments will be arriving soon

Quote from Josch

I downloaded it but just played a few minutes.That part I played was really nice

I think I will continue playing this evening

Further comments will be arriving soon

Cool.

Help

I don`t get the point of this puzzle:

[Blocked Image: http://www.abload.de/thumb/gear_testchmb_03c000rpv.jpg]

How can I get the cube through this energy-field?

I tried to deactivate the field in the right moment while the cube was heading upward but the cube had not enough speed to pass the field...

Please help me

Whoa thats odd, we never had that happen to us in any playtests, how did it get there to begin with, did you fizzle your box or?

I got the cube two stages lower. I carried it upwards, i hat to press a button and then to jump up to the "15MW-Super-Button". But my cube cannot follow me through this odd energy-field....

Hmm, its a bug...

I`ll try the level again and lets see if it will happen again...

Or is it the task to get the other cube (in the left of the picture) out of the pipe?

EDIT: I just loaded the last autosave and tried it again - it worked perfectly.

It just seemed to be a strange bug that the cube couldnt pass the field in the first time...

I finished the maps after 36minutes at the counter. But with the many reloads and so on it took me about 1,5h to get through the three levels.

My conclusion:

A very funny Map-Pack. The puzzles aren`t too easy and not too hard it took just a few minutes to check out what to do.

I enjoyed very much the parts with the changing gravity and the much flinging in the last part of the map.

The cool design is another plus to the map.

All around a very good map, recommandable to all portal-player

Yeah, I'll give that a look at, it's really odd you ran into that. Thanks though!