Portals

Portals starting up on a Konsool: the SynthEngine 3D and Graceloader screens, the title seen through a portal, then the menus, the stories and the settings. Music and sound effects, no speech.

A Portal-like puzzle game for the Konsool. Twenty test chambers, two portals, and GLaDOS watching. Then stories: packs of new chambers told from a desk between the rounds.

Ghost races against your best runs, and other people's. Lifts between the chambers. Cubes, buttons, turrets, faith plates, light bridges and energy pellets. A chamber editor on the badge itself. GLaDOS speaks, through SAM, the C64's Software Automatic Mouth.

Put it on your Konsool Stories → Speedrun board →

How it plays

Shoot two holes in the white panels of a test chamber, one blue and one orange. Walk into one and come out of the other, keeping your speed: fall far enough into a floor portal and a wall portal flings you across the room. Then the chamber starts adding things.

Behind the title screen the chambers play themselves. With Lifts on, each chamber ends in a lift that carries you up through the chamber and down into the next. GLaDOS reads every chamber's line out loud, in SAM's voice, and the turrets talk back.

On the Konsool's keyboard

Every key but Esc can be changed under Esc → Controls. Settings has the rest: portal depth (how many portals deep you see through a portal), quarter resolution, music and menu music, sound, GLaDOS's voice, lifts, ghost races, frame times, screen and keyboard light, and Portal LEDs, which light the badge's LEDs blue and orange while your portals are open.

Make your own chambers

Esc → Chamber editor opens the chamber you are in, as a copy. It shows one layer at a time from above: Q and E go down and up, the arrows move, a key picks a brush, Space paints (hold it to paint a line) and B fills a box. Every piece above has a brush: white panels, goo, doors and their buttons, droppers, lasers, bridges, gel, pellets, crushers, turrets, funnels.

P play-tests it on the spot; F saves it to /sd/portals/chambers/, and Chamber select lists it after the twenty. If it has a mistake, a door that is not a box for instance, the editor says what and does not save.

A chamber is a plain text file, a picture of each layer in letters, so you can also write one on a computer:

name: 11  Two rooms
hint: The button opens the door.
size: 8 5 9
facing: north

layer 1
########
#......#
#......#
#......#
###aa###
#......#
#.1..C.#
#...S..#
########

One layer of five: # metal, . air, a a door, 1 its button, C a cube, S where you start. The layer under it is the floor: white panels (W) and the exit (E).

Every letter, and the rest of the format

Race yourself

With Ghost races on, every attempt is recorded. Beat your best and that run becomes the chamber's ghost, racing beside you next time. Put a friend's ghosts in /sd/portals/ghosts/rivals/ and race theirs.

Record a run saves what you press, frame by frame, to the SD card; Watch a recording plays it back and times every chamber. The tool-assisted run, attached to every release, finishes all twenty chambers in about 40 s; on a badge it has done it in 39.58 s.

Then put it on the speedrun board, straight from your Konsool over USB. The board replays every run with the game's own code, so the times are the replay's: real runs and tool-assisted ones apart, for the whole game, each story and each chamber. Something went wrong in a run? Send the recording as a bug report from the same page, and it can be played back exactly as it went.

To the speedrun board →

Stories

After the twenty test chambers: stories. Each is a pack of new chambers with its own music, and some are told from a desk between the rounds. They go on the SD card; put them on your Konsool from scene.rs/stories, the same way as Portals itself.

Human in the loop

Aperture's test generator needs a human to break its drafts. You are the human. From a DOS desk: GLaDOS's flawed chambers to cheese, a debugger for the broken ones, mail, a birthday cake that keeps moving, and a choice: the cake or the queue. From a story brief by Renze of Nicolai Electronics.

A desk story · eight chambers · office music

Off to Hackfest

Hackfest is on Saturday, at Sickhouse in Enschede. A few geeky chores first, then the way there: by train, by bike or by van.

A desk story · three ways there · chiptune

After hours

The tests are over. The testing is not. Chambers for after the twenty: the last train home, the cleaners' paint, a parcel to post, a two-way funnel, a laser to bend, bowling night, pellets in the dark, turrets on the night shift, a deadline under the presses, then a production floor, a canyon and a spire.

Fourteen chambers · synthwave

Told from a desk

A desk story starts at a terminal, not in a chamber. Read the files, the mail and the calendar; type GLADOS (or GO) for the next round. In Human in the loop the rounds are GLaDOS's drafts: solving a draft the way she meant teaches her nothing, so you cheese it, she patches the flaw, and you play the patched draft again until it is final. A broken draft opens in a debugger, with a few changes to spend; play-test it and reach the exit.

Put a story on your Konsool → Write your own

Under the hood

Portals runs on the Konsool's ESP32-P4 under Graceloader, on SynthEngine 3D, a software renderer. The engine has no stencil buffer, so the view through a portal is drawn first, clipped to the portal's edges, and the room after it, with holes where the portals are; nested views go up to three deep.

GLaDOS's voice is SAM, the C64's Software Automatic Mouth from 1982. The music is made as it plays, a tune for each story, and it follows the game: up when a turret spots you, dull when you die, muffled in a lift. Every chamber has a scripted solution, and every build has a player on the PC solve all of them first: a change that breaks one does not build.