What were your very first mapping attempts like?

Really cool to see the various ways people have started off! Quite inspiring, and some of those first maps look pretty cool!

For me, I've made a tree :)

Uhum 

In 94-95, we had DEU, and I didn't understand half of it. No internet to find things either. I remember not understanding tags, for example. But I could make doors.

I remember trying to make a James Bond map. The player started on some cliffs and had to assault a base with a giant door, by going through some vents. 

My first mapping efforts were in 2016 and run through GZDoom and I did that thing where because GZDoom automatically treats a 0 tag as local. Replaying them in a classic style port leads to ... much silliness. You can go play them, somehow they ended up in DUMP2 along with something that happened to be in the same folder but not something I wanted to submit.

Before getting back into taking mapping more seriously I spent 2020 nursing something just to work out UDMF and better mapping tools than GZDoom Builder, but I'm going to keep that one to myself for now.

My first attempt at making a map was of some kind of facility with a outdoor area that had lights with the wrong light distribution.

And also non-working elevators and (of course) unpegged doortracks

SQUARE

then no ideas

delete.

My first map, made sometime around 2003 i think. I literally just discovered this page here in doomworld, downloaded all of the editors i could, and after trying them out, the only map editor i could get to run was DeepSea (nearly every editor was DOS and i had no idea how to run them). I started by making simple edits on the IWAD maps and later on other people maps with deepsea. Eventually i dared to make an original map on my own based on a specific spaceship. I had no idea of what i was doing, i didn't understood the concept of sectors and lines at all, so i just used the square tool and placed a few squares in the map because i didn't knew you have to draw shapes to make sectors, and i deleted some lines when i wanted to join stuff. The end result is a map that barely works. Oh and this was made directly on doom2.wad, since i didn't knew how to make a map on a separate wad. To top things i had a few custom graphics so uhh... enjoy

Few screens

I still have the first maps I ever made for GZDoom (and Doom in general), both of which are unreleased. There are two candidates you can consider: my first map ever and my first proper, finished, and "polished" map.

My first map ever is actually a (bad, 1994 map-tier) recreation of I.M. Meen's first level, and basically a test run of what would eventually become the MeenTC. It's called "Doomguy VS I.M. Meen", and would've involved our boy John Stalvern making his way through I.M. Meen's labyrinth to kill the now demon-spawning magician, with one level representing a labyrinth "zone". I had to use what was available online - note the temp ceiling and switch textures, and low-res floor tiles I took from I.M. Meen's automap - because I didn't want to make an account on Xentax just to get the I.M. Meen graphics ripper. I scrapped the project as I didn't like how it was turning out, but did return to the concept later and ended up remaking the entire game in GZDoom.

For my first proper level, look no further than "Cell Block 9" from The Adventures of Rin, my first Doom WAD that actually went somewhere. It would've involved a prisoner of unknown origin escaping from the body of a living mechanical god, and this was the first level. It's a somewhat linear level where you have to find three keys to escape, but it's much more competent than DVIMM - roughly equivalent to an early map from a late-90s vanilla megawad. Sadly, I also canned this project, though I'd carry ideas from it over to my future works.

For example, I used the general layout (and the cell the player starts in) as a base for another prison map, in an indefinitely-delayed project of mine. Look to the left side, and you'll see a reimagining of the central courtyard, high-security to the west, cells to the north, and "reception area" to the east:

I think I might have improved my mapping skills??

This thread has motivated me to compile a zip containing over 50 files consisting of:

• My first mapping attempt from July 2015 (given what my first released map is, it's about as unimpressive as you'd think)
• several unplayable map fragments and prefabs (with unbuilt nodes anyway)
• a few pokes at Doom 64 mapping with varying degrees of commitment circa 2016 (and then never again)
• numerous Confinement 256 scraps for some reason (and maps for other abandoned projects)
• some actually finished maps that were just never posted anywhere beyond Discord or my harddrive

Go nuts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mine was an ugly triangle filled with every enemy in the game one pillar and john romero's head

also the name i gave was too embarrassing to say out here in the threads so message me and sign the "Cringe waiver" To agree for me to read the name of it out loud 

Like every good mapper, I started out as a 14 yr old with a vision of making a whole megawad based off of all the cool things he played within the last couple of months. The screens are in chronological order until the final ones which are a little more ambiguous, but quite clearly I began to devolve from a normal techbase enjoyer (oceanbase enjoyer at that) into a common slaughter mapper who is obsessed with dark metals/rocks + color highlights. After a while I realized my maps and computer just weren't built for gzdoom and I didn't use gzdoom's features extensively anyways outside of 3D floors and dynamic lights (and DECORATE monsters). I really liked the boom maps I played, and you can guess which ones those were based on the later screens, so after a while I thought it just made more sense to go from gz in hexen format to just boom mapping. Really the first screens are first attempts at making a classic all-timer megawad's beginning episode(s), and the later screens are first attempts at making combat puzzles, slaughtermapping, and trying out the aforementioned aesthetic. I think I had logged 9 maps or so until I ditched the megawad entirely. There's some good ideas in there, particularly in the later screens some ideas there are still somewhat compatible with how I map these days, so maybe I'll find ways to recycle them for future maps.

I would like to say I still have the same ambition as I did back then, I just am a way better mapper now and have found my taste and niche. I've gone from trying to make realistic settings to more abstract settings with artificial ways of making areas look good (usually by spamming light gradients where the lighting doesn't actually make sense lol). Major L for me though for spending hundreds and hundreds of hours fiddling with these maps and DECORATE for over 2 years (2019-2021) just for them to never see a release and only surface through random screens I've sent over the years, culminating in a few paragraphs describing it briefly in 2024.

And yeah the rubik's cube looking map screens was a map I made where I had the genius idea to combine solving a rubik's cube with slaughter gameplay with silent teleporters with 10s of thousands of lines on screen at once with hundreds of monsters on a crappy laptop in gz. I learned to solve a rubiks cube just to make that map, and in the map you do actually solve a rubiks cube and the squares change colors and everything for each step with an earthquake shake for "immersive purposes". I also made a monster that had a railgun with a laser sight/tracer thing so you would see a laser tracking you before you got hit with the railgun..I was cooking with ideas in 2019-2021.

Now I make maps like this:

You should release them Kinetic, every mapper in this thread , has pretty much made something that is unique, and as long as it is playable why not release them?

A Doom 2 map made with DEU and DCK back in... 1997 or something. One rectangular room with BIGDOOR3 plastered all around and a abstract room with green slime falls all around and maybe... a inverted cross sector made of lava? No doors or anything, to escape the BIGDOOR3 room where player spawn was placed you had to noclip it. The slime room had a cyberdemon, but i am not sure. Also there's a map called HANGARS for Doom, is just 4 rooms with different themes with a corridor joining them, i had it in one of my CDs, the Doom 2 one was vanished.