Portal 2 Authoring Tools beta now available to all PC users

Listen up fellow science lovers. Yesterday (May 10, 2011) Valve opened the Portal 2 Authoring Tools beta to every Portal 2 owner on PC. These tools will help you take those complex ideas that have been festering in your scientific soul, and spill them all over the floors of game development. Should you wish to partake in this wonderful science-filled adventure, visit the “Tools” tab in Steam and start downloading. It’s free of charge.

The Portal 2 Authoring Tools are more than just a few virtual items that can be put together to make an underwhelming challenge room. They’re comprised of the same highly volatile and sometime hilarious tools that Valve used when creating Portal 2. If you’ve played the game, you’ll know just how big of a deal that is. The Portal puzzles were all designed to make you feel incompetent at first glance, but you always come out the other end feeling like a genius.

These tools will allow you to make single-player and cooperative maps. Valve is also throwing in the ability to make your very own “character skins, 3D models, sound effects, and music.”

It’s things like this that keep a community going. We’ll well aware of how clever the Steam community can be when given the proper resources. So go ahead and give Gordon Freeman a portal gun. You know you want to.

Via [Think With Portals]