Portal 2: Displacement mod

It is with a heavy heart that Im announcing that Ill be putting this mod on hold for the time being. This is not due to any kind of drama (despite getting some offers that didn't really go anywhere, this mod was a one man job) or any other serious reason, but mainly due to combination of many small causes. In the last couple of months since my last blog post, I've done some minor work on the mod, but I was primarily focused on other things (work, education, and relationships) and over time my interest in the mod has faded somewhat. I've always wanted to tell a story with my Portal 2 mod, and yet over time I have realized that I didnt really have a good inspiration for a story that could be told in a mod made by one person. I think given enough time and effort I could have come up with something interesting, but it could take a lot of iteration to make it good.

Another reason was the glitchyness of my mod. Being a mod for a portal game (no source code), it relied 100% on hacks and VScript to work. While I think ultimately I didn't do half bad with what I had to work with, it became apparent to me that working under these limitation it would be very difficult to implements some of the improvements I've come up with in response to the feedback I've been given about the mechanics of the game. Not to speak of the frequent crashes that a portion of the playerbase had issues with. That isn't to say that solving this problems would be completely impossible - source engine has many cracks and crannies that you can use to your advantage even without the source code access, and there were many cases in the past where with a little bit of creativity I've managed to overcome problems that seemed unsolvable at the first glance. However, this too would require lots of time and effort, and at the end I ended up feeling really burnt out with it.

Now, I am not saying that I will never return to this mod - perhaps some day I will get some inspiration that will push me again into wanting to struggle with the problems I have outlined here (as well as other that I've omitted), but as it stands right now, I feel a need to move on to other, slightly less frustrating projects. I will leave the download for the alpha version available and the polls open, so that I can have some extra data to work with when and if I come back to this endeavor.

To all those who helped to playtest my mod and send me feedback - thank you! Even if nothing ever comes out Portal 2: Displacement, thanks to you I still gained valuable experience in poll-based open development that will help me in my future gamedev project, and you should not feel like your effort has been wasted. To all of you and those who had followed this mod: thank you, and hopefully youll hear from me soon!

~WhyNott