Grounded: A Portal 2 Level, Part 2

Greetings! Last time, I talked about the concept behind the Portal 2 level that I'm working on. Now it's time to get a bit more into the process.

First things first: Hammer is hard. Okay, well, not that hard. But for an amateur, it took me longer to get used to it than I expected (though it did happen, and now I feel like a pro intermediate!). This required me to scale down my initial design a lot, at least for my first run at the level. I decided to take out the narrative completely for the first version, as it got in the way of making the actual puzzle design as good as it could be within the time-frame I had to make it. I still designed it with the narrative concept in mind, so it won't require an overhaul to add in the narrative in the future.

I came into this project with very little knowledge of Hammer, but within a week I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities. The hardest thing wasn't figuring out how to use the program itself, but figuring out how to figure out how to use the program. With programs like Hammer, there's always more to learn. I started off with some basic tutorials to get me acclimated, then looked for other tutorials on specifics. That kept getting me snagged, especially since most of the tutorials online are videos and take some time to get through.

What ended up helping me the most was finding a community level that had a lot of the aspects that I wanted in my level, then decompiling it and reverse engineering its features in Hammer. I had two instances of Hammer open at a time, one with my level and one with a completed level. This ended up being a much faster way for me to learn, as the context was directly related to what I was doing and I could look at specific little parts instantly. I got proficient enough to start figuring things out on my own, which is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

My canvas!

I decided to start out by using the in-game Portal 2 level editor to create a basic layout for my map, which allowed me to spend more time on the actual mechanics of the level. It was incredibly easy to export it to a Hammer file. The only issue I ran into is the fact that everything was modular. Every single square of the walls was its own brush, so I had to clean it out and simplify it.

Cubes... cubes everywhere.

I realized that my ideas for puzzle elements weren't enough to make a level. I needed a more cohesive, high-level design idea to really get things going. I came up with two basic themes to shape my level around: juxtaposition of size and allowing for creative problem solving. As you can see in the layout, The main part of my map consisted of a very large room attached to a very small one. I called the small section the "closet", and one of the main themes became taking things (mainly white gel) out of the claustrophobic closet and spreading them around the large room.

Soon, I had basic, playable level. Well, it wasn't beatable...but it was playable! The next step, of course, was to playtest it...