What were your very first mapping attempts like?

My first attempts at mapping was a big square of STARTAN2. It was a lot smaller than I had expected it to be when I tested it - to my surprise - as I had drawn a big enough rectangle to fill the whole screen in the editor. Then I found out you could zoom in and out in the editor and actually make areas bigger than 512x512! The next milestone was understanding 1st and 2nd sidedefs, which I didn't for a long time. I could only make doors and raised/lowered squares in the floor for a quite a while, until I opened MAP02 in the editor to try and figure out exactly how stairs were made. None of my problems were lessened by the "amazing" editor I was lucky enough to download - which I actually stuck with for a long time because I didn't know better and feared the learning process using another editor would be as troubled as the first. Doom E2 (Doom Easy Edit) was its name, and bug-ridden was its game.

After a few more big STARTAN2 rooms with boss shooters, cyberdemons, bfgs and lousy architecture, I found out about tags and line specials, upper/lower unpegged textures and other useful info - thanks to stubling across The Unofficial Doom Specs by Matt Fell somewhere online. (I still use this document to determine what line specials to use in a given situation as it is still the most accurate). This resulted in a magnificent sewer level, which had slime tunnels / pools that could be drained or filled. I was very satisfied with it, until I started getting ugly bleeds and rendering bugs. Turned out I didn't know what having a bunch of 0-length linedefs in a map will do to the rendering. Also, DoomE2 would crash if you deleted a linedef you had drawn in the same session, so I would avoid deleting unwanted linedefs by instead dragging the vertices together - slowly filling my map up with 0-length linedefs I had no way of finding afterwards.

I probably could have salvaged that map somehow, but unfortunately it was lost in the great hard drive crash of '89 - really '97 - but the battery in my 386s bios had died, so it was january 1st 1989 every day.

I hope it's easier for new mappers to learn the basics and find proper tools these days!

I didn't know that I could reduce the grid size below 32, so it was rather... clunky.

I also lost the WAD it was a part of (Titan's Pass / titanpas.wad) thanks to me trying to import a custom monster into it by dragging the WAD into the WAD, so... oops.

(Said custom monster, properly imported and heavily modified, did however end up as the final boss of my one idgames release to date, Depths of Insanity / depths.wad)

44 minutes ago, pavera said:

You can find all my early and abandoned work here in my Graveyard

 

It's filled with gems such as ReEntryway and MASTERPIECE.WAD, and it really shows just how much of a hack I actually am!

 

 

Playing Graveyard was a wonderful confidence builder.  If a master of mapping like Pavera can make stuff like this, maybe I can be great too! :D

46 minutes ago, EANB said:

My first map posted to the forums was hosted on an ephemeral mid 2000s upload site and is now lost. It wasn’t good, but I got some constructive feedback that put me on the right track. Its biggest crime was a single sector room with a strobe light stuffed to the brim with Revenants and Barons that was very unpleasant to traverse. It was otherwise a bunch of irregular rooms connected by a teleport or single door with wildly different themes. Typical beginner stuff.

 

I remade that map as BHOUSE shortly after. It’s better, but still not good. Way too many barons and a little cramped, but I at least had the basics down of how to construct Doom like environments. It got reasonably positive reviews on idgames and newstuff but it definitely doesn’t hold up.

 

5 years later I remade that map again as Journey to Erebus, this time split into 3 maps. Better still, but not great and there’s plenty about it I would do differently today. It’s been 12 years since then (!!!) so maybe I’ll do a 3rd remake sometime.

This is the type of stuff I love to see, people remaking things from when they were younger. Cool beans. 

Luckily I preserved mine.

And boy oh yikes, it is one hell of a ZDoom abomination.

Never actually built anything past this area...

Crate mazes, startan, and immature naming schemes... ah I loved me some crate mazes lol. Oh and simpson doom 😂😅 My first maps were all doom 1 with tnt textures and simpsons all over the place

I went into mapping with an idea of having a level where you need to go around the central room each trip getting you up one level and floor in the central room would raise up to open a new passage. I grossly misunderstood the scale of the game at the time - - I had, like, 256 units tall bridges and it looked awful - so I had to abandon this map but I later remade it into MAP05 of my Hell Frontier wad.

My first ever mapping attempt was in Half-Life. I discovered the precursor to the Hammer editor on my Half-Life disc and began to tinker. I made a terrible introduction map where you walk into an HEV storage room, get your suit, and walk to a hallway that brought you to a teleporter. It was supposed to lead to more levels but I never did follow through on that map pack. Then I recreated Halo's Beaver Creek in Half-Life, which I think was a much more fun experience than making standard Black Mesa style labs. I wish I could say I still had it but sadly I do not have any of my old mapping experiments.

My first Doom mapping attempt was in something like 2007. I made a sewer map, lmao! It was exceedingly simple. Just a box room with a teleporter and bars blocking the stairs. The teleport lead to a spiral hallway with a key in the center. Then up the stairs and to the exit. It was bad. And my next few attempts were equally bad. There was one map that was almost something worth publishing, but I never finished it and I lost the most up to date version when I did consider going back to finish it. Now it is completely lost, but that's not a big deal.

I sometimes wonder if I should take another stab at Half-Life, but Doom is just so much fun to map for that it's hard to imagine working in the Hammer editor.

I actually have the very first Doom maps I ever mapped. This was circa 2009, I was probably around 12 years old at the time. I tried to make a mountain base for tnt.wad that descended into the sewers. The first room is a long prison hallway where you can feel free to "explore" each and every single little cell. And half of the doors are unmarked yellow key doors for whatever reason.

The next few maps go on from there, until a dead end is finally reached at some point. It is one of the wads of all time.

My first attempt at mapping in 2016 was for Chex Quest. I was trying to recreate a map I dreamt of when I was 7. I didn't get very far with it and it's probably gone for good by now. I still remember the dream: You started in a rectanglular, gray room with a door and 4 windows connecting to the next room, which was a bigger gray square with some flemoids and ammo scattered all over the place. Boring, I know. :P

Over the next several years I tried Doom mapping occasionally but it didn't really click for me until around April or May 2023, which is when I made the first map I ever placed an exit in (I never fully finished it): a shitty Chex Quest 3 map. I've improved very rapidly over the past 8 months and the difference between that map and maps I made in the past week are huge.

My first Doom level. I used heavily upgraded version of this map in my first released Episode.
 

I first started on Half-Life but sadly I don't have the .bsp for the first room that I've made... it had brushes that were off-grid, stretched textures with incorrect aspect ratio and none of the objects had func_wall or func_detail on them meaning it had terrible optimization.

Still have access to the first room I've made in Doom though.

I don't have any of my very first WADs anymore, but they were all just edits of a few Doom 1 or Doom 2 maps to turn them into what were essentially slaughter maps.  This was all around 1994 or 1995, and I was just modifying built-in stuff because I didn't understand how to properly close sectors yet (remember, this was the time of DEU) or understand that I needed to build the BSP nodes after saving.  But I could still change some things.

The earliest map I still have saved was from later 1995.  It still didn't have properly closed sectors, but I at least figured out how to build geometry.  It was originally going to be the first map in some series about demons invading a mining operation called "Trouble in Shaft 9".  In reality, this ended up being the secret map in episode 1 of my Kill megawad, included as an homage (with fixed sectors) of where I came from:

I added a Holodeck to the NCC1701D.wad.

My first try.

I don't technically have my very first map, since it was only a test map which consists of a series of box rooms and halls connected with loads of every kind of Doom monster and weapon. I was following the tutorial videos on the Doom Builder website for DB2, and that was my way of playing around with linedef trigger actions, doors and whatnot.

My first honest attempt though is a map called Mezzanine (last modified December 7th, 2009). A recreation of my grandparents' house as a reference point for how I could play around with creating spaces in Doom. It's got doors going into the sky and midtextures set as solid walls, as I was just getting a handle on how everything works. A better version of this map exists as MAP01 for Eternally Yours.

My very first mapping attempt was for Duke3D because I played a ton of Duke as a kid, and it came with an editor. The build mapper was really nice, actually. Had 3D view, and room-over-room stuff that was so simple to do, even my 12 year old ass could make it work. Except for swinging doors, those are super annoying to make. You started at a hotel reception desk, went up the stairs to a hallway with copy-pasted rooms, one of them had a key, and then you'd jump out of the window on the streets bellow, and then I've given up on it, haha. Sadly, it's lost to time on mom's old computer.

And my first Doom map is.. well I actually posted it here:

It's not the first map I posted, it's the first map I made. I felt like it's better to not release the first thing straight-away. So I released it later, after some other maps I made. And I had different name back then, sorry for the confusion. That was made in October 2021, that's when my journey began.

20 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

My very first mapping attempt was for Duke3D because I played a ton of Duke as a kid, and it came with an editor. The build mapper was really nice, actually. Had 3D view, and room-over-room stuff that was so simple to do, even my 12 year old ass could make it work. Except for swinging doors, those are super annoying to make. You started at a hotel reception desk, went up the stairs to a hallway with copy-pasted rooms, one of them had a key, and then you'd jump out of the window on the streets bellow, and then I've given up on it, haha. Sadly, it's lost to time on mom's old computer.

 

And my first Doom map is.. well I actually posted it here:

It's not the first map I posted, it's the first map I made. I felt like it's better to not release the first thing straight-away. So I released it later, after some other maps I made. And I had different name back then, sorry for the confusion. That was made in October 2021, that's when my journey began.

 

That's nice I also wanted to try to make a map for Duke nukem 3D but the mapste32 from eduke32 feels very dry compared to ultimate doom builder. I also wanted to make a map for blood but for that I have no idea which editor to use.

My very first attempts were mostly flat maps with default textures and things all over the place. Most of them are probably lost, but here's one that I found from 2014. Requires (G)ZDoom.

An average box room with an arachnotron in the center. I discovered then, that 50 bullets is just enough to kill it

As far as I remember, when I made my very first map in the old Doomcad editor in the 90-s, I did not yet know how to make doors. Therefore, I made several large sectors of complex shape, which were separated by small sectors with a raised floor. And in order to jump over these sectors with the floor raised, the player had to perform several tricks with running along the pillars. Like in the first screenshot:

And my second map was a courtyard. Just a big square with different crap, where you have to fight with different monsters. But at the end the player entered another courtyard, where he had to perform a trick like jumping from a great height into a narrow gap. Something like the second screenshot:

Both screenshots are taken from my megawad "A Bit of Nostalgia", completed in 2023, where I, among other things, reproduced several ideas from my childhood (with some changes, of course).

I still have my very first level, back then I was really excited for Sigil, it was so appealing to me visually, so I was **trying** to replicate that style on my first level.

Although i'm not very proud of how the textures look now, lol.

The 2nd level I did was a mess, but I did bring a hellish structure from that level for Doom Refired 's Stygian Council Map

When I decided to start mapping I decided to make one map where I would learn about all the basic stuff, stairs, making elevators, things like that. And after 4 months and one give up this comes out.

Proud of the map even if it’s obviously way too long

my first attempt at mapping...

I unfortunately do not have my first maps i've made when starting but let's just say that they we're bad like i was using Doom builder 2 kind of bad.

Door making was a bitch I felt like charlie getting the golden ticket when I got it 

I'm oks school and self taught never really watched a tutorial lol 

.

Making megawas since March 5 2 go

I did my first map thanks to my friends... (literally, years of trying to make me map :'))

and is this shi- piece of cake

@Clippy and the Lamp both know how it go'ed... It's not a bug, it's a feature...

Few years short of 20 years ago(exact date dont remember) discovered doom map making and made series few vanilla doom 2 maps(Think at the time i only had DOOM95 to run doom).

Very first one from memory was very small ultracramped map with 2 keys and it used one of BIGBRIK textures.

Second one was small techbase that used lot of midtex windows and 3 keys and required secret to leave starting area.

Third one very small hell map that almost exclusively used CRACKLE-s.

And fourth one was revisit of second one but with FIREMAGs everywhere.

Unfortunately that WAD got lost completely to some kind of editor saving corruption or something like that.