Your very first wad: how did you feel about it back then?

Im sure there are a lot of mappers in this community, and just out of curiosity, what was your first map, wad, deh, file that you've ever made and how did it make you feel to edit doom for the first time?

Personally, I started editing doom using DeHacked 3.0 back in 1997 and was astonished at the simple that that I could replace the plasma bullet with the arch-vile flames. There was my first file...a very crappy flame thrower that i addored so much. After 8 years of doom editing, i think i have gotten a lot more picky about what was "good". Back then, a moving barrel that had its green colos replaced with red that could kamikaze you was good enough. ^_^

My first map was a crappy Deathmatch made made with WinDEU. It's a big circle (with 32 sides) with some smaller cicles inside. The floors go down from the outer circles ot the inner ones. IN the middile was a meagsphere/ There where a few pillars and a door that opened to nowhere. This was my first Deathmatch map. I had some fun playing with my cousin and we kept trying to get the megawhere and never could reach it since there was 18 cyber demons around. What fun that was back then.

My first would be a deh patch that let you shoot projectles to destroy them, pretty crappy, but I had some fun shooting revenants homing shots back then.

Weasel's Weapons for EDGE. I gotta say, I felt pretty disappointed that I didn't make it to the level of Immoral Conduct, but I soon realized that almost nobody could at that point.

And today? Well, I'll be blunt - I think Weasel's Weapons is officially a pile of crap.

Do you know about Daedalus? It looked exactly not like that.

Some really shit Map01. I mean, it was really really retarted and awful.

Immediately after making it, I thought "heh, at least I can make doors".

The first wad I ATTEMPTED was something called SPRBLOOD.WAD...I never finished it cause I got bored.

The first wad I finished was sillysounds.wad. I thought it was fucking hilarious and my brother did too. I even tried to share it with people at the Zdoom fourms. (And here as well.) Looking back, I can't believe I sounded like that...I made it in 2003 when I was thirteen and now I sound much much older...I sounded like I was 8 and now it sounds like I'm 10 years older.

This was my first true wad that I had made. I made a before that, but they were just practice runs and would early on get full of unclosed sectors. I didn't understand at the time how sector references worked, so when they messed up, I threw out the map.

RandomMarine said:

My first would be a deh patch that let you shoot projectles to destroy them, pretty crappy, but I had some fun shooting revenants homing shots back then.

Whoa? That didn't crash the game? I crashed the game whenever i gave the projeciles health and made them shootable.

If I wasn't so gosh dang lazy, I would have been able to answer this question ages ago. :P

I did a something-thousand times 128 single sector, with some BROWN texture, light level set to ... oh, I don't know, 60? And I packed it full with shotgun guys and imps, health and ammo. The start was in one end, the exit switch in the other. The player started with the back turned to all the monsters. I called it "NIGTMARE". As you can imagine, it was completely worthless, but in hindsight it was actually better than some maps I have played in the archive (not many, though).

The feeling I had was mostly frsutration over not knowing how to make doors or other adjoining sectors.

I was proud of my accomplishment and thought it was the shit. Little did I know it was fucking crap.

Map01 of this set was the first fully completed map I built. Although I had obviously built a few 2 or 3 sector maps as experiments before that. I thought it was good at the time, but looking at it now the map is quite dull.

blau.wad

and I hate it! all I think about when I play it is how much better it should f been.

Its too bad I don't have my first wads anymore, altough where awful to look at it would be nice to play them sometimes and see how much my mapping skills have improved since then.
When completed I thought I had made the best map ever, if I had released it it would't have been run straight into the ground for sure.

Back then the first thing I learned to make where teleporters, ofcourse the flats didn't line up with the 64x64 grid.
It looked like an bigass square with alot of platforms in them where monsters would stand on.
No doors at all since I didn't knew how to make them, I learned alot of things all by myself without help from forums or tutorials.
I like to figure alot of things out myself, if I have to ask it on an forum it feels like I failed to understand it.

jerk.wad

i lost it, and it was for doom2

prior to mapping i was just gfx hacking doom1

My first attempt at serious wad authoring was just modifying Doom II maps. I selected the ones with the best layout, and deleted portions to make them suitible for Deathmatch. I had about five or six of these that I would play with my friends via a DCC.

How I felt about them? They were fun but not really pretty looking. I have since lost them, and would like to play them again. I had some fun times.

I would never even consider releasing them nowadays.

My first wad (I never released any of them... and I didn't know how to upload them.) placed you in the shoes of a space cop. You had to stop a cult that had gotten their hands on the gateway technology from using it to open up a gateway to earth. When I finally learned how to set up Doom Builder and get the Iwads and exe things right, I started to make it and was amazed by how it turned out.

My first finished map rocked, it even had a manc in it.
However, it lacked dificulty settings and any form of lighting.

As my WADs forum thread indicates, I haven't finished a single one yet. =^P But I like how it's turning out so far.

My first ever "functionable and runnable" map was created somewhere around March of 1999.
It was made in DEU 5.21 for DOS.
It was a PWAD for E1M1. It contained an overuse of COMPBLUE and GSTONE textures all clashing with each other.
It was a mass of rectangular rooms and rectangular alcoves. And there were tons of MARBFACE pillars inserted into almost every room.
There were no curved walls whatsoever, because at that time I still didn't feel confident enough to insert new vertices on already exisisting linedefs. I kept thinking that it would always cause the game to crash, because DEU's default nodebuilder really sucked, and I was too n00bish to go looking for better nodebuilders out there.
I was also too n00bish to make doors. So all rooms interconnected as empty door frames with some slight height variations, LOL.
The only linedef tags/sector tags that I luckily managed to figure out at that time were: teleporters, nukage floors, and crushing ceilings. Those seemed way easier to make than doors.
Also the brightness/lighting variations between two interconnected rooms was a major contrast. Sector #0 with brightnes of 240, and sector #1 with brightness of 05. Believe it or not, I actually thought it was so cool back then. But then something in my head clicked and I realized that it totally lacked that crisp fine-tuning atmosphere which is present in id's original craftsmanship.
To make matters worse, I didn't care or bother about texture alignment either. The only thing I cared about back then was "OMG, I finally figured out how to make the damn stuff function and show up on the screen, OMG!"
The weapons in that little wad were a shotgun, a chaingun, and a plasma rifle. The enemies were imps, zombiemans, demons, spectres, and cacodemons.

This very first map of mine was stored on a floppy disk for about a year, while I kept working on other map samples and improving my knowledge and improving my skills.
Then it got deleted because of it's ugliness once I've finally learned how to make doors and texture alignments in other more-decent maps.
However many prototypes have also been completely scrapped along the way.
I don't need to preserve embarassing crap in it's original data form forever, because I can always memorize it with my brain, and then describe it to someone later under less embarassing conditions, such as this thread here.

My very first playable wad was some dm wad, I knew it was shit but people seemed to like to say "Great wad!".

Although not my first, I recently found a bunch of levels I made in late 95/early 06. Most of them are pretty much on par with other stuff from back then (read: godawful).

There's a half-decent E3M1 replacement and a largely incomplete level set that was supposed to be a megawad but only made it to map08. Most of them suck ass and aren't fit for human consumption. I wasn't aware of unpegging doors and lifts or how to texture upper/lower at the time, and all the teleports have to be stepped on and then back off because I didn't know how to flip linedefs.

I was thinking about releasing the better ones if anyone is interested. I'll fix the glaring faults but leave it intact otherwise.

Unfortunately all the wads I made between then and about 2000 have been lost to the sands of time. Some of them were actually pretty bad-ass. Oh well.

I was quite happy with my first WAD. Happy enough that even now I don't mind *too* much providing a link to it. The original was released early in 94 onto the CompuServe Action Games Forum. This version is a little newer with some minor tweaks, but I have no idea what they are. I don't think it's changed much from the original release anyway. I no longer have the very oldest version. It's still fairly typical '94 stuff, but better than some. It even has a rising staircase which is the first line/sector tagged action I ever did. So why isn't it tag #1? I have no idea.

http://www.zen64060.zen.co.uk/my1st.zip

Going back in time here...

I remember a couple of my first wads. Most of them I never bothered to release.


Ultimate Doom:

"Hell's Halls": Ah yes, my first attempt of a map of a hellish base. The layout was as linear as you could get-- Point A to Point B. It consisted of areas with ROCKRED, SP_ROCK, and WOOD5 most of the time, just about every (successful) door I made opened into the sky, and there was ammo everywhere. On a positive side, at least those areas with a sky turned out ok on my first try.

"Forlorn Fortress": The first map I made based off of a drawing. This one I believe I put more effort into compared to Hell's Halls. Some of the layout was odd though. An example would be a room with a switch that when activated, three pillars would lower to reveal...nothing. The texture scheme was constantly changing as well.

Doom 2:

"Stone Stratagems" (20-map wad): Gahaha, here we go... Upon getting my hands on Doom 2 for the first time back in 2001 or so, I went crazy with all those stone textures that Doom 2 provided. Some maps had tons of monsters, some were very short, some had areas with some Doom 64 inspiration, and most importantly, most looked like they were built within two hours. They also had music taken from many sources of projects like Requiem, Momento Mori 2, and Operation: Biowar. Later on after about map15 or so, I finally started using some variation and a little more detail (just a little). At the end, I decided to build a map based off of another drawing... My first attempt at a comp/tech map with a Doom 1 E2/TNT-esque atmosphere but with a rather weak ending. Well, I guess it was...ok...for it's time and for a novice mapper, but now it's like...GAAAAHH, my eyes! Hell, I even had a boss brain in map01 one time.


Ok, well, my first DEH file... I had the audacity to apply the pain elemental's lost soul code pointer with the blood sprites. Shoot a marine, three lost souls appear, and then all of a sudden, there are 800 lost souls around you attacking each other along with 2 FPS goodness. Yes...

this is my first map. What did I think about it when I first made it? I thought it sucked. What do I think about it now? I think it sucks.

I tried to make the tutorial map in Doom Builder. I got that two rooms and one hallway thing down, but I became irritated at not being able to edit my levels in 3D like I do in Duke Nukem 3D. I thought it was huge piece of crap, even compared to what I was creating in DN3D at the time.

I actually discovered my first levels recently!

SPIDERS.wad was my first real level. As you can see, it is a gigantic room full of millions of spider masterminds and an exit on the other side.

DEATHWD.WAD was supposed to be a deathmatch level, and consists of a large dark room full of shotguns, with some teleporters.

DD2.WAD I have no idea. I don't even remember making this.

I've only made three wads. the first was called hex.wad. it was a crappy base that featured a bathroom from hell. I released it and then tweaked it a little with zdoom features, like a security camera and other line specials. it still sucked though. it was way too small and linear. I think that it was way too easy with the weapons/ammo/health/monster placement. the level desing was very simple to.

the second map was a sequel to hex that took place in a city, but I lost that somehow. my third was a dm map that I never released. I don't think it would have been received well. it was a small, dark, cramped map using textures from gothictx. it features a zdoom deep water sector in the middle. I have fun with it every once in a while killing off bots

I've only found one WAD from my 1994-1995 mapping era, and that's a (slight) modification of E1M1 with a crazy titlepic replacement, dated March 1995.

The first wad I made was back in either Novemeber or December 1994. It was a single-sector map which was a 16-sided circle transformed into something hideous (via vertex draging). It contained a soulsphere, a blue armour, an invulnerability sphere, a rocket launcher, a shitload of rockets, and a Cyberdemon.

I wish I still had it.

The earliest made-from-scratch creations I have found are dated 1997 and all of them (except for one extremely fubar map) are available right here.

The first map I made was for Doom2. It was completable in under a minute. You started in a southernly grass area where went up few steps onto bridge, which seperated an easternly and westernly grassy area. Once on the other side you came down some steps into the east and flicked a switch to lower the middle of the bridge. This allowed you to pass through to the West where the exit was. It was mostly populated by chaingunners but flicking the bridge switch unleashed a trap of lost souls. Weapon wise you got a chaingun and a chainsaw. There was a secret shotgun and soulsphere as well.

Despite it's simplicity (and poor texture choices) it was a pretty intense little level and I still occasionally have a blast today. When I first made it I was quite proud of my restraint as I suffered the usual temptations to fill the level with Cybers, a BFG and invunerability spheres.