The shape of the chamber can be molded by dragging surfaces in or out and a quick tap of the ‘p’ button flips and selected surfaces from portalable to non-portalable (or visa versa). switch linked to a panel) to the exploded engineering view of each gizmo which appears during editing. From there, the toolbar on the left hand side of the screen provides the would-be Aperture engineer with access to each of the available features you can add each one, once placed, can be edited using the right-click contextual menu to adjust its operation… and again that signature Portal charm shines through from the little heart that appears when you make an element connection (eg. On creating new chamber you are presented with a suitably cold, scientific… yet cute Aperture style interface with isometric view of a simple basic chamber containing three mandatory elements: it must have an entrance, exit, and large observation window. The game has already defined the idea of short puzzle-style levels, the aperture testing facility is intentionally constructed of repeating modular building blocks, and the interior colour scheme/theme is all pre-defined… handing the player the keys to a test chamber construction computer and saying “here are your tools, get to it” is the obvious progression. Portal 2 is one of the best candidate games I can imagine for this user-friendly level design experience. The build engine was, in many ways, just as accessible… although it involved messing around with sector effect sprites, sector tags, and hours of frustration in trying to get those damn subway cars to go where you wanted them to…
I spent many hours as a teenager glued to my PC learning the intricacies of ‘Duke Nukem 3D’ level design. … and this isn’t my first foray into the world of level creation.
Yes, Valve had previously released a full dev kit for Portal (and if you want to see an excellent community made mod then check out Portal Stories: Mel), but this was all about the normal person with that spark of “ oh, this would be a really interesting level” about them, but not the time to invest in learning a complicated developer environment… in a roundabout way I’m trying to say that I’m their target audience. In its least fanfare presented way, it is a level editor, aimed at allowing any user to quickly an intuitively create ‘Portal 2’ test chambers, publish them to the steam workshop system, and easily subscribe to others.
The perpetual testing initiative was a clever slice of free post-launch DLC for ‘Portal 2’ released in 2012 with this cute aperture science video/octopus to go with it.