Portal: Singularity Collapse mod

Hello everyone, Enderek here.

We know you haven’t heard much from us for the past 1,5 years. We’re terribly sorry for that, but boy do we have something to show. Here at Project Collapse Studios work has been going great for the past half a year. We have been planning to release a showcase way earlier, but because PSC is a passion-driven hobby project, sometimes stuff gets into the way, and we cannot really do anything about that.

To be honest, I still cannot believe this much time has passed since the release of Recycled Aperture V2 showcase. Over this chunk of time, we went into some troubles. When working on a passion project this big, not always everything will go as planned or as you'd like. In our case we lost a little bit of motivation to work on the project or simply were burn out. But has been for some time thankfully over and progress is being made as much as ever. Without further ado, let’s get right into it.

Fajr & Crash: Let's first talk about one of the most important parts aside the visuals and sounds, the story!

Over the past one and a half years we made significant progress on the story aspect of the mod especially around the environments of Recycled Aperture.

Also we, the writers, alongside the whole team sat down to brainstorm possible concepts for the ending and decided on the main concepts which we all think is the best for the mods story.

With the general structure of the mod being decided, further work on the story will be simpler and we look forward to bringing the community a satisfying and rewarding feeling bundled together with a story worth looking into.

SteamStream: Puzzle design plays a major role in a player's overall enjoyment of the mod. Too difficult or complex of puzzles and you'll turn away a good portion of the audience from the slow and arduous climb, ruining the pacing of the narrative; while too easy is a bit better overall, but I believe there would be issues with the player’s engagement and investment in the mod. Finding that ideal mix between simplicity and complexity to fit players of all skill levels is quite the task but is something that is constantly being considered during each puzzle. As for how the puzzles will play out themselves, well as you may know the main element is a laser that splits into two, so with that a lot of progression in puzzles will be made through aiming lasers at different places. If this sounds a little tedious, yes it can be if not made with great care. With every proceeding puzzle, new ideas are to be explored and applied to give the player new challenges and ways of thinking as to hopefully never feel repetitive.

Enderek: Music is also very important for us. To strengthen the essence of the Old Aperture feel, it needs to be carefully composed. A properly composed track can make the player really feel immersed into the experience, let’s hear from our composer, eNPeCe.

eNPeCe: As the game composer for this mod, my approach was to capture the essence of the main character's loneliness and confusion through music. I crafted a melody centered around one note, with neighboring notes positioned just a half step above and below, creating a sense of disorientation and unease. The music used in the showcase reflects the emotional state of mind of the protagonist, immersing players in the atmospheric world of solitude and perplexity within the game.

Morten Fjeld (aka MF_Kitten): The sound of the Portal games is extremely well-established and well known by everyone, and it is deeply tied to the comedic tone of the games. It also helps offset, yet punctuate, the dark elements of the story. We are viewing this universe through a different lens this time. We don't want to make light of the darker parts of Aperture's story. So naturally the audio needs to follow suit. Conceptually, there's no getting away from the amazing work done by Kelly Bailey and Mike Morasky in the Valve titles. And we would be foolish to abandon what they taught us. The first thing I did was request a feature that lets us set the blending between sounds over distance, controlling the fine details of when sound A blends into sound B, etc. Valve pioneered this feature in HL2, and you notice it especially in explosions and combine SMG fire. But they hard-coded these parameters to fit their own needs for that game. My ideas involve having sounds that change tonally as you get closer or further away from their sources, making you hyper-aware of your moving through the air or a space. There's also a lot of potential for musical sound effects to blend between chords, or to have a little melody fade in as you get closer to objects. I have been talking to our composer to make sure we are in agreement with how the musical sounds and the actual music will work together.

In terms of aesthetics, I am leaning into the hard and heavy gritty side of things. Mike Morasky played into the "old vs new, organic vs digital" idea heavily in his sound design and music for Portal 2. I am going for the same basic description for my sound design, except I am choosing to "forget" what Mike's audio sounded like, and only remembering what he was trying to do with it. How I am going about it is entirely different. The first sounds I have looked into have been the actual portals themselves, some ambiences, and those huge old lights in old Aperture. I want the portals to sound more like they're made from hot electric energy. Unstable. The final appearance and animation of the portal borders will ultimately be what decides the sound, but I already know the elements that are going into it. As you get close to the portals, you will be hearing an unstable deep hum and a hot sizzling crackle. A sound design practice I am trying to bring into this old engine is a more modern dynamic range. Old games are LOUD. While doing a full modern dynamic mix isn't really viable for a mod like this, but I've had luck in bringing the overall loudness down, and the dynamic range UP. This will make for a lot more impact in the sounds! I can't wait to start cooking for real as all the fresh designs are finalized. Seeing the vfx and environment art coming together. Without spoiling too much I have been sampling my old VCR for some of the elements in this mod...

DistantJetlines: When it comes to updating the textures, we were met with certain challenges that are mostly, at the end of the day, self-imposed. Mainly because we've already seen it proven that there's success to be had in leaving the 2011's texture fidelity as is. At the same time, I argue, though, that there is merit, both in terms of eye-candy, but also in terms of atmosphere building, to tackling the question of aesthetics anew, both in terms of mapping techniques but also in terms of introducing newer, higher-fidelity assets. And so, we set out on a quest to remake certain often-used materials in higher definition. The challenge here mainly lies in the way I chose to tackle the process of texturing: by using procedural generation (i.e. Substance Designer). This approach, of course, provides a number of benefits, like easy resolution scaling, as well as easier adaptation for different workflows, be it traditional Source lightmap rendering or PBR. However, with the way I was accustomed to using it, there was one major downfall: it turned out very hard to replicate the stylization so inherent to Portal 2 textures. The way vanilla materials look results in many ways from the limitations and the techniques they were created with, like hardware-driven fidelity caps or the inclusion of real-life photographic visuals. Yet as of now I'm still trying to stick to purely procedural texture creation. There was a couple of ways I found to both preserve and adapt stylization quirks to higher fidelity. In certain instances, it required rethinking the material from ground up (the eternal question of Wood or Plastic?). There's still much work to be done, but I am looking forward to all of you experiencing the familiar in a new, higher-fidelity light.

In-game render of selected new textures:

Enderek: 3D-Modeling always plays a major role in the development process of our mod. It’s a very time-consuming process and unfortunately, we don’t have much to show for this sub-part of development. Progress is being done though, as an example, our talented modeler Oktocentillion has made a new Super-Charged Laser emitter model:

CodenameHenry: In this section of the article, we are providing you with a showcase of an even more refined version of our unique test chamber style, Recycled Aperture. Of course, before art passing, we first make a map block-out according to the puzzles designed in the puzzlemaker. Once the layout is finished, we decorate. Recycled Aperture is quite different from the original Old Aperture, as it's meant to represent repurposed chambers mixed with newer technology. That is why the surroundings of the puzzle are decorated with "skeleton chambers" and various scaffoldings, cranes or debris. The exteriors of the chamber walls are filled with ducts, pipes, cables and electrical boxes, while the interiors contain junk and plywood.

On another topic, I would like to talk about the process of mapping. As multiple mappers work on each map, we have to be very organized, and that is where manifests come in handy. We separate various parts of the map into different submaps, and everyone can work on their own section that way easily. As we want the maps to have as much detail as possible, but also be polished, making a map can take quite a long time; sometimes even up to 2 months (however, that depends on what type of a map it is). All in all, working on maps for PSC is a lot of fun and fuels teamwork!

Enderek: Now the culmination of everything explained above. We have worked hard on bringing you this (short, but interesting) experience, enjoy!

Trico_Everfire: As one of the programmers of PSC, I've been working hard on making us custom tools we plan to release alongside the mod. Hereunder are some examples of some of the work in process tools. They are currently incomplete and subject to change. All tools will be open sourced as much as possible. If you have any suggestions for tools or things you would like to see, then place a suggestion in our discord. But we cannot perform miracles.

Enderek: I can surely say that Trico is a very talented person. Our current programs include VTF Edit Revitalized, which is a complete rewrite of the popular program VTF Edit. This rewrite allows us to work on Linux, but also use Strata Source’s specific VTF additions, such as VTF 7.6 deflate compression. With this, our textures will reduce in size, improving the storage space required for the mod.

Lev: We've decided to re-design a logo spontaneously. I came up with a thought of making the new logotype simpler, and Enderek gave it a shot. We've looked through a few variants that I have sketched, and firstly picked what details we liked the most. After that, we combined it all, and in a result, we've got a new logotype! As I understand, the idea of making a logo simpler was in the air for a while, and now we finally have made a better version, which is more recognizable & easier to animate.

Enderek: Yes, you’ve read that right! We will have a Steam store page! This doesn’t necessarily mean we’re close to release though, sorry. But that will help us in multiple fields of our development process.

As an example, we use Git for day-to-day work on PSC. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a program that monitors everything that happens in our mod’s file structure. You can then upload the changes, and after that everyone can download them from the server. The major problem with Git is that you need to learn how it functions. It is a rather complicated program to learn, and a steam application would make the process of downloading or uploading changes and the mod itself during development a lot easier for those which never used that program before.

Now, if someone only wants to test the maps, for example to design music, or beta test, they don’t need to struggle with Git, they can just download the mod from Steam!

Next thing is that we also need to gain some popularity. Our team is pretty big, but as you’ve read, we are also doing a lot of work bringing this project to a new standard. A Steam page could help us find new developers (more on that later) and draw attention to our project. Up until now our main channel of progress sharing was either on ModDB, or community servers, now we will also have Steam.
Unfortunately though, for reasons not depending on us, we were unable to release the Steam page before the showcase. We will notify about this later on our discord server, when the store page goes public.

Enderek: We’re always happy to show publicly what we’ve accomplished, but some things of course are not going to be showcased. This project has grown in size massively, and I’m very happy that we’ve managed to achieve this much, even when there’s still lots of work to be done. I would like to publicly thank all of our developers for the amazing work they are doing, and also you, Dear Reader, for helping to keep our mod going. Seeing all of the public’s reactions to our work warms everyone up and gives a very strong motivation boost to work further on this project.

As I’ve mentioned before, unfortunately we still cannot give a release date of this project. Most Portal fan games takes multiple years to finish, we are hitting our 3^rd year mark around this time. This means that there’s still a very long journey ahead of us.

Enderek: Our team is pretty much full, and that’s great news, but we’re still missing out on one position: Hard-Surface Modeler(s).
We’d be more than happy to hire [voluntarily, of course] one or two hard-surface modelers (with texturing experience).

Bringing assets to a new standard of visual fidelity is a big deal to us, since every texture or model which we make currently stands out from the rest shipped from Portal 2 (and CSGO). That’s why there’s a lot of modelling work to do, and we also have to include our mod specific models. If you feel interested in helping out our project, have some skills related to Hard-Surface Modeling, send us an application form: