Pass N' Play

Work through this cooperative challenge with a friend! Traverse lasers and turrets with your portals and learn to pass equipment back and forth!

Available through Steam Workshop as an add on to the game Portal 2!

Created by: Jordan Grayson and Justin Vo

Design Doc: 

The first design decision we made was deciding to make a cooperative level. The reasoning behind this decision was just that we both enjoy cooperative games and we just thought it would be cool. However, this was arguably the most important decision for the future of our level. We endeavored to shape the level to be conductive to cooperative play in every segment. After playing some cooperative levels for inspiration, we decided one of the most fun mechanics to employ is the passing of objects back and forth between players using momentum. Therefore, we decided to focus on this as one of the core mechanics of our level. Additionally we added in the use of lasers and laser redirectors to compliment this, as one player could have the laser emitter and the other player would need to pass a redirector over so they could solve a puzzle, complimenting the momentum passing gameplay. We also tried to implement some aspects of asymmetry between the tasks of each player. Both players are working towards solving the same room, and do so in similar, but slightly different ways. Finally, we tried to iterate on the passing throughout the three largest rooms of our level, going from passing while being able to see your partner, and then passing blindly, with a timer. 

The biggest complication for the creation of our level was hitting the entity limit, as both the cube droppers needed for the generation of momentum for the cubes, as well as the fizzers that separate the rooms are very entity heavy. However, we were ultimately able to make some sacrifices in the ways certain rooms work by reusing cubes and having less buttons and droppers in total to bring down the total entity limit within the allowed bounds. The other main side effect of this though, is that we had to build the level with as few lights as possible in order to save on entities. This means we tried to limit each room to just having the minimum number of lights possible for being able to see effectively, and we used the few spare lights we had to try and highlight notable things to the players.