Warning: Everything is subject to change, this might differ from the final release!
Basically, this will be the "Intro" of the mod. The player makes his way through the enrichment center, meets fellow scientists, gets an impression of the where, why, when (Enrichment Center, Doug's job, end of the pre-GLaDOS era). This chapter is supposed to give the player an idea how big this place is, and that it is full of other humans. The exact opposite of the abandoned Enrichment Center as seen in Portal.
In this chapter, the player will help to prepare everything for GLaDOS' activation. It will contain some puzzles, such as activating some switches. Maybe it will give the player some practice with the Portal Gun, too, and teach him some basics, such as picking up things and activating buttons with them.
This chapter exists merely for storytelling reasons, and will be very short. The player witnesses GLaDOS' activation and her little "experiment", that kills almost every living thing inside the facility.
Show the player the repercussions of the disaster: Dead scientists, destroyed parts of the facility, neurotoxin everywhere. Doug must solve some puzzles, to shut down some neurotoxin emitters, to clean the facility from neurotoxin.
Give the player some test chambers to solve, and show them how insane Doug actually is, without his medication. Demonstrate the duration of this period (30 years?) by let the player "sleep", wake up again, and see the facility a little more destroyed and abandoned. Make the companion cube speak, and make the player experience some Déjà-vus from Doug's past.
Doug makes his way to GLaDOS chamber, in a last effort to shut her down and escape, but never reaches her. The way is blocked by a huge room, filled with turrets (known from Portal), and since he lost his Portal Gun, he can't defeat them. Meanwhile, GLaDOS unemotional watches his failure from a monitor. Mostly storytelling here, too.
Doug wakes up after Chell defeated GLaDOS. Finally he can escape the facility. But he has to return, to make sure Chell survives. The Party Escort Bot dragged her back into the Enrichment Center, and Doug has to re-enable the emergency power supply, to provide her cryo-chamber with energy. In order to do so, he gets shot. After saving her life, he falls asleep, and the player doesn't know, if he will wake up again.
Outro
Portal: Ratman Stories is now on ModDB! From now, all blog posts will be posted on ModDB too. Also, I might post assets such as models or textures.
Here's the description from ModDB:
Portal: Ratman Stories is a fan-made mod for Portal, featuring Doug Rattmann (from the Portal 2 Comic) as Protagonist. Ratman Stories starts the day GLaDOS got activated.
Doug Rattmann is one of the few survivors of GLaDOS neurotoxin attack, and gets used by GLaDOS as a test subject.
What this mod does want to beWhat this mod doesn't want to be
- A (mostly) canon-conform prequel to Portal
- A new campaign for players, who completed Portal
- More challenging than the original game, assuming the player has completed Portal
- An official prequel
- A substitute for the Portal campaign
- A complete game
- Too easy
I understand Ratman Stories as a fan-made campaign for Portal, telling Doug Rattmann's story, not as a full game. Remember, everything I post may change until the mod is complete.
Planned chaptersThird-party assets used
- Aperture Science Inbound
- Last Minute Preparations
- The Awakening
- Schrödinger's Cat
- I'm different!
- Face-to-Monitor
- It can't be!
- Credits
- Male Aperture Scientists by Paynamia