Portal 2: [SP] Loud Pipes Developer Commentary

Loud Pipes is my second published Portal 2 map. The design and mapping process took about a month and a half (due to a lot of restarts) and required a good deal more work than my first map. My goal was to capture the essence of the Cave Johnson theme while creating puzzles that were more about methodical thinking rather than lightning fast reflexes. In this developer commentary, I will go over some of the challenges and benefits to working in the Old Aperture style.

The first major challenge of the Old Aperture style is designing for the confined spaces of the spherical shell. Although Old Aperture levels seem to be gargantuan, there are a lot of tricks involved that try to make the maps seem bigger than they actually are. Thus, one of the most important components to designing an Old Aperture-themed map is capitalizing on the exterior portions of the map. The enrichment spheres are meant to give an ominous impression, full of damaged structures and deteriorated walkways. A successful Old Aperture map looks daunting – although it has survived the test of time, there is always that potential for danger.

Understanding the purpose of the test spheres is essential to creating a successful Old Aperture map. The structures weren’t meant to be beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, but rather to be quickly built and dismantled. You can see all of these in the details: air conditioner vents hang out all over the place (both externally and internally), wires just hang from roof to roof and everything is constructed out of cheap plywood covered in left-over paint.

As for the puzzle design, I wanted to experiment with the speed and bounce gels (and what better time to use them than their native setting?). Loud Pipes is technically a level with two major puzzles and two minor puzzles. The first minor puzzle is the first room and serves to help the player understand the “Infini-gel” concept – bouncing between two painted surfaces to gain incredible momentum. This concept returns in the first major puzzle when the player attempts to reach the large complex hovering over the level.

Looking down at the first and second puzzle.

The second minor puzzle is found inside the speed gel stage. The player has a lot of practice understanding that speed gel combined with a “runway” can give them enough momentum to reach buttons in high places, but there hasn’t been much hardship outside of that. For this puzzle, I have the player start up a moving platform that spends a portion of the time under a box dropper. The goal for the player is to use the speed gel to fly up and activate a switch while the platform is under the box dropper. With proper timing, this puzzle is not difficult. It’s when players just try to brute force through the mechanics that they find themselves restarting this puzzle several times.

The "timing" puzzle.

The final puzzle lies on the peripheral of the last puzzle: the point of obtaining the box is to fling it over to the other side of the fizzler (the blue energy walls that destroys all matter aside from the player and the portal gun) and shut it off. As I introduced in the commentary of Freefall, the exit of this final puzzle is immediately noticeable at the start of the speed gel complex and the player works towards this goal at all times. Nothing should feel thrown in for no reason.

The great thing about the Old Aperture style is that you get to design the puzzles with the notion that they aren’t tests. In the campaign, the player isn’t solving the puzzles in Old Aperture to satisfy GLaDOS, they are solving them to climb higher towards the surface and escape. With this in mind, the solution of the final puzzle in Loud Pipes is combining both gels to make a runway-launchpad that fires the player through a destroyed wall to the deteriorated exit elevator.

Both gels are used to complete the final puzzle.

You can download “Loud Pipes” in the Maps/Mod section, under Portal 2.

Posted in: Design