Yesssssss. Now those of us that wished for more Portal 2 faster can start to see some custom levels without resorting to playing through the co-op for the umpteenth time. Also, those of you that wished for harder Portal 2 levels (as it was several notches away from fiendishly hard) can start to see more of what you like, bless your masochistic hearts.
The Authoring Tools themselves look to be similar to the Authoring Tools released alongside (six months later than) Left 4 Dead, which in turn is similar to the Source SDK. Therefore, it has the full suite of various modding tools, such as the ever-so-elegant Hammer Editor, the Model Viewer and other such tools. The main bonus here is that you can actually make levels specifically for Portal 2, instead of resorting to the slightly-hackish methods of porting all of the content to the Alien Swarm SDK, which several enterprising modders figured out.
In related news, this looks to be the break the much-troubled Portal mod Portal: Awakening was waiting for. After several bouts of extreme developer drama, the new lead modder announced that they’ll be porting all of the Awakening content over to the Portal 2 engine, once the SDK is released. So, soon-ish, I assume.
The SDK itself can be accessed in the normal manner in which such materials are accessed, which is the Tools tab in your Steam library.
Hooray!
Eagerly awaiting a list of maps worth playing. Hint hint.
Tyler Jinks, why hast thou forsaken us?
This.
:C
The main reason I left was that it all boiled down to the fact that it just wasn’t fun to trawl ModDB for hours on end to find something worth posting about. Admittedly, writing about games should (and is, in my opinion) be fun, but in the end it became just a chore that I would force myself to do. Sorry.
I think that it’d might have been different if I wasn’t the only one doing it. If I had other writers, and I did have two people interested in writing for UC when I put out the call last time, but none of them actually did anything so it was left to just me at the helm, steering the ship. Writing for a gaming website isn’t–and from what I’ve seen, can’t be–a solo operation. You need multiple people to balance each other out, to talk about things, to keep things interesting. It was just something that UC lacked once Andreas, Lewis and Matthew left.
That’s not to say that I’m leaving forever, which is probably the main reason I left silently instead of making a whole grand hooplah about it. I’m still more than willing to continue writing for Usercreated, but I can’t justify doing it by myself. If I had two or three other people that would want to do it, heck yes I’d jump at the chance to continue writing. It gives me a reason to write, at least, something I’ve been doing none of recently.
I wish I had submitted something now! When I have a chance I may just write about a mod or two and email them your way. Feel free to dispose of them as you see fit.