What were your very first mapping attempts like?

Let's talk myhouse, myschool, mygarage, mydedust2recreation and stuff. Your very first, probably unreleased and lost to time, mapping attempts. What did you try to make, and how embarassing were the results? And how much time has passed between your first mapping attempt and your first released map?

While my first released maps date to 2016, my first mapping attempts date back to 2012 at least. I remember them vaguely, but I think my first map was actually a cave. I found some map on the Internet and tried to make a level based on it in the style of a cavern. I worked on it quite a bit, but of course it was abandoned and lost. All of my early map attempts were lost due to me changing PCs and not backing up stuff.

I remember how when in early 2013 I learned about Slade, I of course tried to put commercial music in my maps, usually completely unfitting to the tone of my maps.

Anyway, most of my early attempts were me trying to recreate some level from some other game. Actually, this hasn't changed much since then: a lot of rooms/areas in my released maps were usually based on something I've seen in other games, I just implement them differently enough that it's not noticeable. I rarely have entirely original ideas, heh.

at the end of the nineties i would draw like 300 lines in winDEU (including some dedicated to sectoring off weird errors I didn't understand at the time), add mancubi, call it good and then spend four hours writing my new epic's storyline :3 then never show anyone

I made a couple of attempts at using an editor in the 2000s, but those are lost to time and were probably one square room lol. I didn't have the patience. When I got back into playing Doom in 2020 after a few years away from it, I started making this terrible Heretic map:

Literally just as practice to learn how to do the most basic stuff like doors and such.

I actually didn't start making levels with Doom, so I did have a little experience with level editors such as Hammer for Source, which helped my map not be absolutly terrible. However, this doesn't mean my first Doom map was good, and I created a generic UAC base that was very square, and ended with a sewer maze.

about 3 years ago, my very first map titled "hello wad". no architecture whatsoever :P regardless, i still publicly published it because i was so happy i actually made a doom map :D

A 5000 side square box full of cyberdemons, spiderdemons, and boss spawners/spawnspots. IDDQD/IDFA until bored. It evolved, after many years, into SlaughterMAX map30.

Hey I started wadding in December 1995 using DEU2 then a gap of two months, Feb 1996, started again, then I took

another 3 month gap to end of May 1996 switching to DeeP 8.35 shareware and did some more wads in June 1996 and another 7 month gap. I then started properly in Jan 1997 again using DeeP.
But My first wads were just test maps just to see what I can do. I don’t own any of my first test wads anymore but have kept my proper wads from 1997 onwards. @Doomlover77  

Actually, more coherent than I thought. Of course it just had to be a Doom 1993 techbase, but it's not as "box with a few Imps" as you might think. But still very blocky.

This map had details, some attempts at combat, but was very stingy with ammo and health and I think there even is a cool softlock. Just getting to the exit would even take me half an hour. And god the map layout was probably about as flat as a Wolf3D level if not for the lifts and that one big lava pit.

One idea I found cool at that time was if you flee from a fight, demons would follow you back to the base with teleporters. And knowing with what I've just said you can guess how hard that map was.

I lost the later versions of that map because somebody was a little bit overzealous with using shift + delete. It had so many more cool looking areas I can't show anymore :(

My skills in 2022

My skills in 2024

I'm still a newbie, though, kinda.

Though I practiced a lot, I never released anything yet (except for one map in speedmap project and "I've got my MTV")

And I kinda suck gameplay wise.

My first 2 maps went like this.

From the first few maps I ever made.  Throwing lots of really half-baked ideas at the wall, making shit up on the fly and abusing animated textures in places where they make no sense (in other words nothing has changed)

Honestly, my first shots at level design for anything usually involve trying to use a bit of every resource and function available, and Doom was no exception.  Unsurprisingly many things didn't work right--I didn't understand teleporters at the time, so the landing teleporter teleports to itself.  Also very cramped, something I didn't start to get past until a couple "serious" maps later.

Improved version but the closest to the first map I've done:

look no further than this map. its the reason I have a shitposting warning on my profile.

alternatively you can play this wad, which is less shit, but still bad.

Nice topic! I tried mapping not so long ago around december 18th 2023, while looking at a guide here in the doomworld forums, courtesy of DoomGappy. Here's the result of the first attempt.

I ended up making two more which were also posted in the Gappy Tutorial's thread. I've stopped for a bit since I didn't know what to make and lacked motivation until I played Sigil recently and wanted to make one similar. Now again I'm stumped and the fourth map is in still in process somewhat.

3 hours ago, Xaser said:

Something like this:

 

 

A link for the masochists. Play at your own sanity, or lack thereof.

How's your sister's headlice?

3 minutes ago, ptrdoom said:

Nice topic! I tried mapping not so long ago around december 18th 2023, while looking at a guide here in the doomworld forums, coutersy of DoomGappy. Here's the result of the first attempt.

I ended up making two more which were also posted in the Gappy Tutorial's thread. I've stopped for a bit since I didn't know what to make and lacked motivation until I played Sigil recently and wanted to make one similar. Now again I'm stumped and the fourth map is in still in process somewhat.

Good to see you around here, ptrdoom. Still waiting for that next one!

35 minutes ago, DoomGappy said:

Good to see you around here, ptrdoom. Still waiting for that next one!

Hey there, I was in the making of one, but I ended up again not having motivation. Here's a little sneaky preview of the starting area.

Don't have the room anymore, but it was a jagged tiny hallway that led to a room with a bunch of zombie men inside each other so half of them couldn't move.  I had a vile teleport in with a line half way into the room, and an exit switch.  I was very proud of myself when I got the teleporting to work and the exit switch lol.  

My first mapping attempts were happened during the last week of 1995. I think. The first editor used was WadEd. Me and my brother didn't quite know what we were doing back then, and I remember messing around with the layout of E1M1. We moved a wall, and when we ran it we got what we would later know as the HOM effect. My guess is we didn't realize we had to build nodes on the map before running it in Doom. Anyway, with that failure we decided to just add more enemies to the maps of episode 1.

Then we played around with DoomEd. And my first attempts were maps with lots of stairs, rooms with deep chasms. The walls were heavily marble and the floors heavily wood. But I would always get the "node line not found" error in that version of DoomEd, which would render the maps unplayable. I don't think that DoomEd would even finish saving the map. Basically, I was screwed whenever gave me that alert because I didn't know what I had done wrong.

But I didn't give up, and when my brother got the Tricks of Doom Gurus book in the spring of 1996, we saw it came with a new version of DoomEd. No longer did I have to deal with that alert, and was able to finally make full levels. I had this fascination with the hell look, and I made an episode for Thy Flesh Consumed that fit that theme. Sadly, all the levels were contained in one wad file, no where else. One day I tried to save it in DoomEd and something went wrong and the wad file was corrupted beyond repair. I lost all my work.

Still, even with all these setbacks, I kept at it. I then made PSFDoom, which replaced all 36 levels in Ultimate Doom. It was created in the style of the original levels, just of poorer quality. And I managed to finish it in the summer of 96. But we didn't have an internet connection yet, even though the computer was capable of one. When we connected, I slowly explored the Doom community, and in late 96, I uploaded PSFDoom and my latest project, Invasion, to the FTP site ftp.cdrom.com.

But PSFDoom and the first version of Invasion no longer exist anywhere I'm aware of. I deleted them from my hard drive when new versions were made, and had them deleted from the archives. Big mistake.

Some updated versions of my early works are out there. E4M3 and E4M4 of Episode Hell are updated versions of some of my first maps. Vengeance is an updated version of PSFDoom. And newer versions of the original Invasion wad are still available today.

10 minutes ago, ptrdoom said:

Hey there, I was in the making one but I ended up again not having motivation. Here's a little sneaky preview of the starting area.

Good stuff! Please keep it up!

As for my first maps, all unpublished:

suffice to say it was very very good

My first public maps honestly are pretty good, but I was mapping for like, almost two years previous lmao. Lots of Nuts clones and failed megawad attempts are still sitting on my hard drive. Shoutouts to the Oblige-ass name "Path Of Doom". Some day I'll release all this old trash for the interest of weirdos like me who enjoy digging through other mappers' metaphorical dumpsters.

I haven't kept my first attempts but it went through 3 steps:

1) Open E1M1 in the editor and add Cyberdemons on the outside and Cacos all over the place. That's the only thing that makes sense to me at this stage.

2) Learn the editor, learn what a sector is and how you manually relate linedefs to it in DEU2, make small rectangular room and wonder "how the f*** can I make a door?"

3) Getting really good and excited and be like "let's make the most realistic Doom map ever", start making some details of broken rocks on the floor and pseudo sector shadows. Getting my first "visplane error" crash on DOS and rage quit for few years :)

Masterpiece level design 

Found test1.wad from 2022, originally was 4 cybers in a square room with SSG for practicing dodging which I had fun with. Apparently I modified it a month or so later apparently so it's two rooms now.

is

I just filled really basic rooms with coloured lighting and reflective surfaces. Also rooms were way too dark and way to cramped. Also never changed the ceiling texture.

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.

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!