The Forsaken Science - 3D Level Design (Portal2 Editor)

Our level design targeted players mainly focus on players with Portal series experience, but we also what to create a playground in which the new players can play (even though it will take them a while to challenge our levels). 

We separate our levels into 3 different main blocks. Each block contains only 1 game mechanic (the one that's not portal control, such as laser set, jumping plate, and light bridge), and 1-3 extended game mechanics (for instance, reflection box, shooting tower, and relay). The reason why we did this is to make sure the difficulty of our levels is reasonable, and keep the entire design not too complicated - we try to create levels that might be a little challenging, but every player can enjoy. 

As we mentioned, we assigned different topics to each of the levels: 

• The first level is mainly composed of jump platforms, even though the entire level is covered by lethal water, we still provide sufficient spaces for the players to do the observation and find out the relationship between each gear or trap. 

• About the second level, the laser set (including a projector and a receptor) will become the major topic. For the quite straightforward mechanics like laser, it seems easy and not so many creative ways that we can apply it at the level. However, when laser system is put together with portal, reflection box, or relay, the complicity will be elevated and sometimes provide many different methods for the players to solve the puzzle.

• The last level is more advanced than the other two levels. The objective of this level is the application of portal and light bridge. With the familiarization of Portal that players got in the former two levels, we gave some higher challenges to the players in this one. At this level, players need to do more observation about how the mechanic work in this level, need to have quicker reactions to the upcoming event, and also need to think through before taking the next step, because rough decisions might bring players to the lethal result.

Oh yeah...I almost forgot! We have an extra level after you pass our 3 levels. lol