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jakery

Guest

Portal Best Practices?

I have more questions than answers, but here are my current opinions on EE portals. If you agree or disagree, I'm interested in hearing from you.

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From what I've seen so far, portals are turning out just like all other level-building tools: terrible when used without thought; great when planned with care.

EE vs. Portal 2

I've seen attempts to make EE Levels where the players use portals to build momentum and make huge jumps. The catch is, EE portals aren't the same as the video game, "Portal." In the 3D game, Portal, players know exactly where a portal will take them, because the two portals are clearly marked: "go in this blue portal; come out that orange portal." In EE, all the portals look the same; You have no idea what portal you're going to come out of (until you try), especially when many portals are close to each other, which leads to some frustrating failures.

The other big difference is camera behavior. In EE, the camera abruptly jerks to your smiley's new location, which is very disorienting. By contrast, 3D portal has the camera stay with the player (which is impossible in a 2D game), so players can see where they are and finish the momentum jump with ease.

Best and Worst

The worst possible use I can see for portals is a portal maze. It's difficult enough to complete a normal maze in EE. With portals, players have to navigate a maze of portal-connected rooms and tunnels with no logical order; we will have to backtrack when we take the wrong portal (which is based entirely on luck), and we never have any idea how close we are to finishing the maze. That's the opposite of fun. So please, don't make portal mazes. I don't want to play them.

The best use of portals I see is the simplest: transporting players from Point A to Point B. Portals will give builders a great alternative to giant, snaking gravity tunnels.

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Do you agree or disagree? What are the best and worst portal uses you've seen? How do you plan to use portal blocks? (Or are you going to pretend they don't exist?)

bobofawesome

Guest

Re: Portal Best Practices?

I think not knowing where your coming out is fun

Nou

Member

Joined: 2015-02-24

Posts: 2,762

Re: Portal Best Practices?

I find them rather badly designed; the physics are broken. Rather than being a portal (meaning you come in point A and go out point B) you teleport and get a speedboost. The boost shouldn't be there.

We will have to wait and see what people concoct with the portals to do any judgement on them I suppose.

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No u.

Muftwin

Guest

Re: Portal Best Practices?

portals will definetly be fun, but theyll also be used in stupid ways sometimes

its like secret blocks

EDIT: i also think making a lvl like portal 2 is possible but will never happen unless someone really wants it to

Last edited by Muftwin (May 6 2011 3:16:30 pm)

JadElClemens

Member

From: Colorado, USA

Joined: 2015-02-15

Posts: 4,559

Re: Portal Best Practices?

I'd have to agree. I think they were meant as more of an alternative to tunnels, or perhaps to save space, and allow a new way to force players into the next minigame, but also allow them to backtrack if they missed a coin.

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I hate tall signatures.

Betaguy

Guest

Re: Portal Best Practices?

Nah, I think its just fun

Shift

Guest

Re: Portal Best Practices?

I totally agree with you, jakery. Gravity tunnels take a while to make, and take plenty of room, as well. In addition, the idea of a portal maze haunts me. I've played that kind of thing on other games, and it's always a huge mess.

In my opinion, a plus will be using the effect the portals have on physics to make new challenges. I see a lot of potential with that.

Oh, and something I thought of (but have no clear opinion on) is that if someone were build up a mass of portals by whatever means, he could use them like spikes on the floor to return you to the beginning. I'm not sure if that's good or bad...