Portal 2 co op levels full#

We also had lots of other San Francisco Bay Area indies in, all of whom helped me time and time again by playing countless levels. The only thing that made co-op possible was being in the IGN Indie Open House, where people like David Rosen (Wolfire Games), Alex Austin (Cryptic Sea), and Justin Woodward (Interabang Entertainment) took time out of their days to run through levels so I could see what worked and what didn't.

Portal 2 co op levels full#

To make matters worse, I did not have an office full of employees to test the co-op levels. This also, however, doubled my informal playtest sessions. Being able to assume at least two players in co-op levels, and only one in single player levels made the level designs much more interesting and fun to create. We're an extremely small team, and this meant doubling the number of levels I would have to design, as well as adding co-op specific features to the game, such as barriers, to force cooperation and roles awarded at the end of each level. The decision to make co-op in the game a first class citizen was a difficult one, but one I'm very happy with. Why Make 54 Levels When You Can Make 108? This removed my need to support players of very disparate abilities and required at least two of the players to be fairly core players. I knew how I originally intended the game to be played, and didn't want to alter that experience, so I abandoned the casual slant and returned to my original core target demographic. As time went on, and the casual marketplace opened up, I got scarred and started making decisions that would be inclusive of as many player types as possible, therefore skewing more casual-friendly.Д®ventually, this just didn't feel right. The game started as a core game, targeting gamers that would enjoy a challenge in both puzzle and dexterity. The final straw was when I decided to go back to targeting a more core audience. I wanted players to need each other and affect one another, thereby creating a stronger connection. I told myself this was a 'feature', because players of different skills could play together without the tension, but this felt hollow as time went on. It also bothered me that the entire co-op campaign could be defeated with a single player, while players two to four sat idly by. Trying to design levels that worked well for one to four players wasn't easy. Sure, the single player levels were fun for co-op, but some levels that would be great for co-op wouldn't work for single player, and vice versa. Initially, I tried to ignore the nagging reminders that it wasn't going to be that easy. I think somewhere in the recesses of my brain I thought that I could somehow pull a fast one - that I could just add three players and say 'look, if you want, there's co-op play!' The circuit has four corners, so each player could start in a nice safe place, off the grid. I didn't want splitscreen, or to deal with a shared camera, so the entire circuit would have to sit on a single screen. Just add more players! The first decisions in A Virus Named Tom were the easy ones. Starting a cooperative puzzle game is easy. I decided mine was going to have both, because it's my damn game, and that's pretty much the beauty of being an indie dev.ДЄ city infected. I was also told puzzle games don't need stories. Cooperation would just be annoying, adding a hindrance.

Solving a complex puzzle is a solitary thing which requires concentration. Cooperation was for killing terrorists, aliens, and zombies. You don't see teams of people solving Rubik's Cubes, and you don't see a cooperative mode in Braid (this was also before Portal 2). 'Puzzles aren't cooperative.' That's what I was told. Here, I'll talk a bit about what I went through getting the co-op campaign up and running. There's a single player campaign, a cooperative campaign (with up to four players), and a vs. Your creator, you see, is a bit miffed about being fired after creating said future utopia. You do this to cause absolute mayhem in a Jetsons-esque future utopia. A Virus Named Tom is an action-puzzler where you reconfigure circuits to spread a virus while trying to avoid anti-virus drones.