Freeware Game Pick: Portwall LD (X-0ut)
Portwall LD is X-0ut's barebones effort at remaking Valve's sleeper hit in under 48 hours for the friendly Ludum Dare 14 competition. Similar to Portal, you can create two separate pathways using the left and right mouse buttons, but the gravity in this contest submission is rather harsh and the player does not have heel springs to save them from a long drop to the ground.
Veterans who have memorized the quickest routes for every chamber in the original can expect to be challenged here, although there's not a lot of levels to play at the moment due to time restrictions presented by the contest rules. (updated version)
Comments
Being spit out of portal didn't sit well with me. Falling down the very first hole until I learned to shoot myself parallel to the edge was kind of a negative. Plus the fact that the portals don't update with you as you move added up to a game I respect for it's technical acchievement, but didn't enjoy as a game.
Posted by: Joe Larson | April 21, 2009 9:49 PM
The updated version doesnt spit you out of the portal and has minor physics fixes.
Good point about the portals updating tho, I'll fix that.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 21, 2009 10:00 PM
wheres the advancing wall of doom
Posted by: daphny | April 21, 2009 11:18 PM
They are there, they push you off edges / crush you.
But I guess my use of it did not fit the theme aswell as I expected it too.. it seems most people didnt even realise they existed :/
Posted by: Anonymous | April 21, 2009 11:39 PM
1). I hope you keep supporting this game. It has great potential for being a sort of "open source" Portal.
2). Is there a level editor? That would really give the game some longevity.
Posted by: Anonymous2 | April 22, 2009 1:40 AM
No game should have a level that relies as heavily on precision jumping as the level 'Jump...'. Especially with the advancing walls of doom adding *more* pressure. I admire your technical skill, but your level design needs a lot of work.
Posted by: AlbeyAmakiir | April 22, 2009 2:32 AM
I used blender for level editing, you can open the blend files found in the Data/New Folder to see how they was made.
They should be exported as obj files.
save as mapn.obj and it will load at stage n.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 22, 2009 2:33 PM
About the level 'jump'
You dont really need to do any jumping at all :)
the portals wil lkeep you bobbing up and down..
Its simply a case of turn, aim fire.
A lot of people seem to have trouble with that stage, which is probably good they dont make it to the next stage :)
Posted by: Anonymous | April 22, 2009 2:35 PM
I actually found the jump level to be one of the most straightforward and simple; just put alternating portals on each platform. What I assume is the final level (the one before the level that's a simple room with up arrows and you can't help but be crushed) was excrutiating but felt great to beat.
I managed to mash the game folder/files down to ~1.5 MB so it'll always have a place on my Flash Drive (with a self-extracting RAR file, you could even get it down to ~900 KB or so).
The advancing walls of doom did drive me nuts, as I prefer to have time to enjoy and play with the level, but this hardly detracted from my enjoyment; a time limit never REALLY hurts, just raises the skill-required bar.
Posted by: Queue | May 2, 2009 11:53 PM