WELCOME BACK

Hello hello! This is a short little update to show the small changes made to Sustain.

This will be a quick before and after with a some of my thoughts that went into influencing these changes.

But you might be wondering: “Why change the chamber?” Uh… good question! I’m not sure! The last update to it to actually fix something was over a year ago! These changes don’t offer anything really substantial, the chamber works as it is. But there were a few things bugging me that I wanted to change. So I guess that’s why I eventually just did that…

CHANGES

One sort of “quality-of-life” change is that I cut down on the dialogue at the end of the chamber. There isn’t enough walking space to justify the dialogue and it was holding up actually completing the level by preventing the exit elevator from dropping (so that the dialogue can be heard and not interrupted). I just cut down on the final GLaDOS line where she responds to the Announcer mentioning the core was overheating. The elevator is still a tad bit late, but not by an overly long amount of time.

And for another cosmetic element, I decided to fill out the open space near the entry chamberlock, in front of the fan.

I also added some invisible clip brushes to prevent the player from interacting with the exposed bits of the chamber, just so they can’t place their cubes or stand in those bits.

To improve visibility of the Hard Light Bridge, I brought it forward and removed the grating protecting it. This should help it stand out and be more easily recognizable as there’s not much in the way and it’s not too recessed into the chamber’s walls.

And for the last substantial change, I integrated the “floating pedestal button” a little bit more cleanly so it fits in with the rest of the level. The original version was a compromise since the button was added after the main environmental pass had been done, but I decided to suck it up and reconfigure this wall section and it looks so much better.

AN UPDATED SOLUTION VIDEO

While the overall solution to the chamber has not changed, I figured it would be good to have an updated walkthrough video that shows the updated look of the chamber.