I... I don't know about this. It's... it's really difficult for me.
See, I basically bought the whole orange box because of the amazing praise Portal got (and also because I wanted to try out Half-Life 2, but please disregard this, as it kind of weakens the point I'm trying to make here). And I found that the game
is, indeed, very absolutely awesome. Fantastic. Great fun. Incredibly funny, and, at the same time, manages to create this cool athmosphere. And you can't beat Glados speak.
Now... that being said, I really liked the gameplay in there, a first person puzzler, with this amazing portal technology at hand. But thats not actually what made the game so
special for me. No, it was this fresh gameplay idea, the cool idea, and, most importantly, the way the game told its story. Please, please focus more on that when you blatantly rip off the game. Wait, did I say it out loud? (Typing, more like). Right now, it just
screams "Clone of Portal!", its sad. Add more of your ideas. Yeah, yeah, I see, you've added the "Tusc"-joke into it - which is, whatever. Who cares, really. But, please, for the love of god, add something to it which is made by you. Right now, you could just as well create maps for Portal. Add your own, exciting gameplay mechanic!
How about, I don't know, how about the player could create his own construction similar how a spider builds its webs? Change the way gravity works, maybe even only for single objects? Rotate things - by which I mean, also complete parts of the level, ANYTHING. You may keep the portals in there, but don't make it the only thing of it. You could even have something unique in every "testchamber". Heck, some of the ideas could be great fun in a 3d environment.
Then, theres the story-side. You know. "Portico Program", huh? Clever. At least, you didn't write "Portalico", that would have been even more obvious, heck, you even replaced the "O" with a portal picture!
That "You cannot create shoes for orphans with it."-gag is too much for me, though. Thats an insider gag, but not a good one.
Please. Think of something. I don't mind being commanded by a huge, sarcastic computer whos voice is devoid of any emotion - uhm, in games, I mean (otherwise, I'd probably like Windows more, hah, a joke!) - and thats a cool way to tell the story. You can do that.
But please. Don't create the dialog using a text-to-speech program. Ask anybody to do it for you, if you don't want to do it yourself (maybe, you want a female voice, in that case, you probably cannot do it yourself). It looses its charme. I mean, yes, the voice of Glados is emotionless (for most of the game, at least), but it IS a human voice, and you can tell. "Thank you for helping us help you help us all" - things like that have to be said fluently without any gaps or breaks in the speech, and text-to-speech doesn't have that. It just doesn't sound natural, and thats the key.
AS for the rest of the story - who knows, really. You're not really telling much, and I couldn't be bothered to encrypt the oh-so-secret messages in your teaser, so maybe I'm missing it.
All in all... I don't know, really. I know how you feel, after finishing the game, I was thinking "Gosh, I want to create EXACTLY that!", but I still think that you should add some of your own innovative, nice gameplay changing ideas.
Your screen isn't too far off of portal, placeholdertextures in mind, but theres still room for improvement (the office space). Apart from that, there really isn't much to see, so I cannot comment on it.
Is the gameplay working? That portal-stuff? That'd be interesting to know.
Then again... maybe I missed the point here, and you are just experimenting to create something exactly along the lines of the game, and your goal is not to "improve" or to create your own experience, but to see if you can create a game like Portal on your own. In that case, disregard the above, and good work so far, although we haven't seen anything about the, you know, gameplay and the portal-stuff. Which would actually be the most interesting
Thank you for your attention. Please don't hate me.
EDIT: Although, that JCL Companion Cone - that gag was great. Thats awesome. More of that, please!
You could create a complete Conitec-companion-primitive-set!
real portal "like".. but .. are you planing to sell this ? .. valve might be mad ^^ --
