Grounded: A Portal 2 Level, Part 3

Evenin'! This round is going to be all about the playtesting that I did for my level. If you haven't yet, check out Part 1 and Part 2 to get up to speed! Or don't! I'm not your real dad! I can't tell you what to do!

...Anyway, the playtesting I did for my level was incredibly helpful. Mostly because it pinpointed exactly why the level was so incredibly terrible! That allowed me to go in and exorcise all the terribleness from the map with relative...still difficulty. Well, without further ado, here are my fantastic playtesting notes:

The people I had playtest my level had very similar reactions, making it easy to pinpoint what needed changing. My biggest tweaks were in regards to conveyance.

• Washing off the paint
• Since it wasn’t utilized this way in the game, people weren’t used to the idea that they might need to wash paint away to reveal a puzzle element. One tester told me that he assumed that the water was just there “in case you needed it later”, and didn’t think to use it on the paint that was already there.
• I took a bit of a risk here. I wanted to make it more clear that you needed to use the water to wash off the paint, but I also didn’t want to make it incredibly obvious. As one of the more novel parts of my level, I wanted it to stand out. So, I opted for more subtle hints at it, relying mainly on the fact that, pretty soon after the level begins, there’s nothing you left to do but use the water. Since I assume players know how water works, I bet on everyone at the very least trying it once they ran out of options. This could actually be a good thing, as the surprise of the “well, guess I’ll just try this” being successful could create a memorable moment.
• Changes I made:
• Made the water in view as soon as the player falls into the room rather than behind the player
• Put a subtle spotlight on the area of the paint-covered wall that needed to be washed
• Made the only portalable wall in the main room facing the paint-covered wall
• Changed the cracked panel underneath the paint (to be broken with a bomb) to a more obvious texture
• Used a type of paint that would serve no purpose in the level and put it only in places where it was easy to discern that it was unneeded for its own mechanics.
• This would have been easier to convey through narrative, but I recognized early on that I would not have enough time to create the narrative aspects that I had originally planned and had to adjust accordingly
• Bombs!
• Initially, there was a button very close to the player when they fell into the room. This button would launch a bomb downwards into a deadly water pit, landing on top of a floating, portalable platform.
• My level has a whole lot of breakable platforms and surfaces, and it became clear through watching all the testers that I needed to convey the breaking-things-with-bombs theme of the level. Players took a while to realize what could and could not be broken.
• Changes I made:
• As mentioned above, the first thing I did was make the breakable wall tile more obviously different from the rest. It still matched, but was much more cracked and broken. I didn’t want to go with something like a huge bullseye, because it was definitely a moment where I wanted to player to feel clever.
• More grates! I added a grate to the initial drop into the level that breaks underneath your feet (unintended bonus: it causes damage to the player, turning the screen red and bringing even more attention to it! Also, when you land, the gibs fall around you.) in order to introduce make the idea of breaking surfaces more prominent.
• I also added a grate directly underneath the bomb dropper. This was one of the more important changes I made. The end goal of the level is to break open a grate back into the vents on the ceiling by sending a bomb through a tractor beam. I was finding that this wasn’t clear enough to the players, so I added an identical grate underneath the bomb dropper, which the first bomb would break.
• I then noticed that players weren’t actually seeing the bomb break the grate is it was above their field of vision. So, I added both a spotlight and a beam light that shine down from the bomb dropper a couple seconds before a bomb is released. As a bonus, this also made it look a lot cooler.
• Instead of having the bomb immediately fall into the pit of deadly water, I left the floor over it, allowing the first (well, second) bomb to break the floor and reveal the water below, along with the two portalable platforms inside it. In addition to bringing more attention to the breaking stuff, it also brought attention to the pit and the platforms inside it.
• I left one breakable platform in without making it obvious: the platform that holds two of the turrets in the “closet” room. I left this in because there are multiple ways to solve that room, and the surprise of the breaking platform was just too good to take out.
• The bomb button!
• I spent more time tweaking this than any part of the level. As I mentioned before, it was originally placed very close to where the player drops into the level to incentivise using it early. The issues with the button were that it needed to be somewhere where it was easy to use, clear, and in full view of everything that it needed to be.
• At first, from the location of the button, players couldn’t see the platform the bomb landed on. So I moved it closer to the actual bomb dropper. But then the bomb dropper grate was even more out of their field of vision, making players less likely to see the grate being broken.
• Also, at that location, it took players too long to get back to the closet room, preventing them from seeing the actual effects of the bombs that they were sending there (they could still see the aftermath, of course, but it made it hard to tweak portal positioning and took away from the satisfaction of seeing things blow up).
• When I introduced the block-button for changing the direction of the tractor beam, it had to be very close to the location of the bomb button while simultaneously being in a location that gave the player time to place a portal underneath the exit grate immediately after pulling the bomb through the tractor beam portal, then pull the box off the tractor beam to send the bomb back in the right direction. This was way too hard for players to finesse and subsequently didn’t feel like the intended solution.
• Changes I made
• After moving it back and forth around the floor of the main room, I decided that I would change it more drastically. I decided to put the button on top of the divider separating the two sides of the room (the divider wall + the water pit cut off the player from the other side of the room, which was the side with the exit grate). Since the floor now didn’t give way to the water pit until the button was first pressed, this forced the player to see the other side of the room before seeing the floor. This exposed the viewer to the angled portalable panel behind the divider wall early on. This was an essential surface for getting the bomb into the tractor beam and I found that players weren’t noticing it early enough.
• Placing the button on top of the divider wall also forced players into a better view of the break-away floor when they were pressing the button, as the only way to get up to it takes the player in a direction the points them toward the bomb-dropper and floor.
• This seemed genius to me until I realized that once you pressed the button once and jumped down to get to the closet room...there was no easy way to get back to the button, making the closet room far more difficult.
• My first attempt to fix that was to put some physics boxes on top of the wall that the player could take down to make getting back up to the button easier once you’ve already done it once. This was an awful and terrible idea.
• My final solution worked out quite well: I decided that the quick moving back and forth from the button to wherever you’re placing a portal was not fun, and the layout of the level prevented any sort of optimal position for the button. So, I left the button on top of the divider, as I found it did work well to get players to see all the elements of the level. I then added some lights to illuminate the button, making it a more obvious desirable target from the get-go. The biggest change was to make the button only require one press, which set the bombs to release at even intervals constantly for the rest of the level.
• Since the button only needs to be pressed once, pressing the button also turns off the spotlights on the button and then makes the button explode because seriously nobody liked that stupid button. Also, it made it clear that it was no longer needed by the player. Killed two birds with one explosion! As a bonus, everybody likes explosions. So three birds, really.
• The tractor-beam reversal button
• A lot of the problems with this button tied into that horrible bomb button which has already been dealt with. But it had some of its own problems, too. The button was required in order to reverse the direction of the tractor beam, allowing a bomb to travel backwards through the portal, then out in a different direction after the player has placed a new portal.
• This required too much very quick and accurate portal placement for players.
• Changes I made:
• I originally doubled the speed of the tractor beam to avoid boring the player when it needed to be used to spread white gel around the level. However, when reversed, it was far too fast, giving the player very little time to place a new portal and reverse the direction before the bomb hit the tractor beam spawner. I didn’t want to make everything slower, as that would create a lot of tedium. So, I made the button change the reversal speed to 1/5th that of the forward speed, but kept the forward speed intact.
• I moved the button to the side of the room with the exit. This made it much easier for players to perform the portal switcheroo, as the location for the exit portal was close.
• Since the button for switching the direction of the tractor beam was in the main room and accessible before the player could even activate the tractor beam, it was confusing. So, first I made it into a cube-only button. Since there are no cubes in the main room, this clued players in to the fact that they weren’t supposed to use it yet. In addition, I put it in a dark corner of the room that gets lit up only after the tractor beam has been activated, making it clear when it becomes important.
• The exit
• It wasn’t clear enough to players from the get-go that the end goal of the level was to get up out of a grate similar to the one you came in through on the other side of the room.
• Changes I made:
• As previously mentioned, I added more breaking grates and walls into the level to let the player know that it was possible.
• I shined a strong spotlight down from the exit shaft, making it the brightest thing in the level. I also made it flicker erratically, drawing attention to it and leaving a brightly marked area on the floor beneath it.
• The closet room
• In comparison to the relatively large and open area of the main room, this room was meant to be a contrastingly claustrophobic room, containing the white gel dispenser, the tractor beam, turrets, and frankencubes.
• Initially, it was just a mess. It had two rows of shelves on either side, and the top shelf held three turrets each. The bottom shelves held nothing, but were slightly longer than the top shelves, allowing the player to hide underneath them from turret fire. This was stupid and no one realized that they would be safe under the shelves.
• In addition, the room was simply boring and if you did manage to get past the turrets, involved just a button press.
• Changes I made:
• This room ended up being quite successful, giving the player a lot of creative freedom in solving it.
• I took out a turret from each side, leaving 4 total. This gave the player far more time to react.
• The white gel dispenser now turns on immediately upon opening the door, allowing it to be used in solving the room.
• The bottom shelves were a different (portlable) texture than the top shelves, and one of them was fallen and at an angle. This allowed the player to shoot either white gel or bombs (or both!) up at the turrets, which also gave more portal access to the room, allowing solutions involving chaining white gel through portals, shoot bombs at the other side, or throw frankencubes through to knock down the turrets.
• I added a bunch of portal boxes to the intact first shelf, blocking the initial view of the tractor beam from the doorway. I did this as to not distract players, as otherwise the tractor beam emitter and the white gel would be revealed simultaneously. This made the white gel the initial focus, as intended. It also added a lot to the cluttered aesthetic of the room, and added a bit of mystery to the objective.
• Debris
• I originally had some decorative debris throughout the level, but most players were distracted by it and spent too much time making sure that none of it was needed for the level, so I took pretty much all of it out.
• Exploits
• A couple players discovered some tricky ways to get over the dividing wall in ways they weren’t supposed to, so I closed all those up. I made sure to still leave room for experimentation and creative solutions, so I only took out the unintended things that were too trivial and easy

So yeah, lots of changes. As always, testing and iterating is the most important part of design! Oh and here's a picture of the button exploding:

Ha!

Boom! That's right, nobody likes you, button! Get a real job!

Here are some more early button placements:

Just chillin' here in the middle of the room for no reason. Don't mind me.

Hey guys just peekin' out to see what's up. Oh, what's that? You can't really see me at all? And if you press me from the front you'll get blown into a deadly water pit? No, don't worry about that. Working as intended.

Almost there! Too bad that once I'm pressed the first time and the ground in front of me is destroyed, there's no way to get back to me! ha! suckers!

Final (for now...) button placement. Sweet, sweet button harmony!

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