Adventures In Level Design: Portal 2

As I sought out temporary avenues to practice game design without a team of programmers and artists, I suddenly remembered that all Valve games come with the development tools to make mods and custom levels. Feeling emboldened by the amazing entries in Valve's official mod contest for Portal 2 (a delightfully vexing puzzle game with a simple rule set and some dastardly challenges), I set out to learn to use the tools and practice level design. Here's what I've learned so far.

While browsing the super helpful wiki on the subject, I came across a couple of schools of thought for level design. One method for designing a Portal puzzle is to use a chart to plot out the various states you want the puzzle to go through before you complete it. This can help you design a puzzle before you really have a vision of what it's going to be. For example...

	1	2	3	4
Emancipation Grid	On	On	Off	Off
Floor Button	Unpressed	Unpressed	Pressed	Cube'd
Storage Cube	Hidden	Out of reach	Obtained	On button
Small Button	Pressed	Cube dispensed	x	x
Chamber Door	Closed	Closed	Closed	Open

This is a simple 4 step puzzle that I designed as a basic way to get started. I selected the elements that I wanted in my puzzle first, and then decided what they should be used for and when they should be used. Apart from knowing what each button actually controlled, I didn't really have any kind of concrete image in my head of what the puzzle would be at this time. But this simple chart gave me a foundation to work from. I ended up with a puzzle that looked like this:

Prolonged exposure to the button!

Ultimately I deviated a bit from the original chart (you can see there are two floor buttons, and the cube was never out of reach), but the chart was just a place for me to get started.

My second attempt at making a puzzle didn't follow this methodology at all, and also happened to be a total failure. Perhaps a coincidence.

I had this idea after intense brainstorming, rather than through vague ideas slowly taking shape as I built the level. In this second puzzle, I wanted to make the player use a cube to press a button to reach the exit, but also require the cube to press another button to OPEN the exit. This time, I had a very clear image in my head of what I wanted the level to be, and I drew it out on a piece of paper before constructing it for real, just to be sure it all worked.

This time, the puzzle was more complicated than I could keep track of in my head. I tried to work out the finer details of the puzzle in a similar way one would if they were PLAYING the game. I created a challenge that was literally impossible, and then tried to make it possible with as few changes to the stage as possible. I would also want to try to obscure the changes I made in some way, so that they wouldn't just point out the answer in a tremendously obvious way. This was the result...

The dilapidated art style of this map is symbolic for my failure.

Much more complicated. It would have been quite a challenging puzzle I believe, if it were possible at all! Sadly, no changes I could come up with would make the puzzle possible without it becoming super simple.

The lesson here is to work backwards. Come up with the solution first, and then build a puzzle to obscure that solution. I'll update more as I make more puzzles, and I may post links to them if I ever find success!