Monarch Devlog #1 (Backlog)

Been a professional lurker on Imgur for some time now, but that ends today!
This is the first devlog post for a small game project I'm working on and with this being the first post I'll preface that I have little to no idea how to build a game!
I've done a grand total of 2 tiny projects before this but I'm happy with what I got so far, I'm inclined to start keeping track of my progress. These backlog posts will be playing catchup to my current status.
Preamble over, the first devlog for project Monarch is as follows:

I love me some puzzle games, especially those of the first-person variety. I wanted to capture the likes of Portal, The Talos Principle, and The Witness. A puzzle game with simple controls and mechanics that continues to interact with the environment in ways that progressively challenge the player.
First things first, I needed an environment for me to play around with mechanic ideas. Found some basic movement and playground environment that I could use to brainstorm.
I landed on the idea of pushing and pulling being the main way the player interacts with the environment. I gave two 'hands' to the player and gave them the ability to pull and grab little orbs found in the environment. The orbs themselves will fall and break if they hit the ground but there are 'anchors' that hold them in place.

Yay controller support! I set up each hand to only have 1 button each (right and left binglebonkus) and bound to that action to be contextual to what the player is looking at or how long they hold the button. In total they can pull orbs, toss orbs, and interact with other static objects (like buttons!)

I wanted a least 1 other main puzzle mechanic besides moving orbs around but was having trouble coming up with something completely original. Figured screw it, I love Portal, I want something like that. After MANY a YouTube tutorial, I managed to get the base logic of portals working.

To save myself some headache though, I decided that portals were going to be set in the world rather than be placeable by the player.

I wanted to make 1 other change to the portals, I wanted them to change the players gravity so they could walk on the ceilings or walls. Sounded cool and figured it would be something fun to play with once I got around to making the puzzles. Because the player's gravity was changing, I also wanted to extend that to any orbs that may pass though the portals, giving the player more ways to move orbs around (yay!)

That about wraps up the main idea and mechanics for the project. Who knows if I'll end up finishing it but for now, I'm happy just to be working on something.

Bird tax