Portal Custom Maps

One of the chief advantages of the PC as a gaming platform is the prevalence of user created maps and mods that help to extend the enjoyment of a particular game. Portal mapping has taken off like a rocket since the game's release, and you can easily find hundreds of new puzzles to help extend the game's shelf life into the years. Various websites have popped up housing and rating various user created maps for your enjoyment.

Part of the appeal of Portal is that its simple map structure allows for far easier map making than for more conventional games. Sure, it's easy to make a very bad looking map for a game like Half Life 2, but to create an excellent one is a labor of love that can take months. For Portal, the artistic style that was established in the original game was minimalistic. This allows designers to focus on making the maps fun and the puzzles challenging rather than on making them look beautiful. The muted color scheme and relatively uniform lighting make it a pretty simple task to create a map that looks good.

Creating one that is actually fun to play, on the other hand, is a bit more of a challenge - but the closing of the art bottleneck has made it easier. On a website like Myaperturelabs.com, you can find 58 maps and mods listed. Thinkingwithportals.com has dozens more, all rated and commented on by a growing community of Portal fanatics. If you've already exhausted everything that the base game has to offer, you'd be missing out if you didn't go looking for new maps.