Do you still have your very first map?

[Red-XIII]

Hello folks,

 

I was poking around my old Doom folder today and I found the very first maps I ever built. 

I remember that I wanted to build a megawad someday, but I'm not sure I'll ever have the patience, time and skill for that (didn't have in the past, hard to think it will happen in the future, but who knows). 

Anyway, I never showed these maps to anyone back then (2010), but now I see no reason for that. 

Keep in mind, these are the very, very first maps I made, you'll see A LOT of garbage, testing stuff and so on, be warned if you decide to torture yourself with those.

There are also some minor bugs, but I left them intentionally because 1) they reflect unexperience and 2) I don't know how to fix them right now.

Here's some comments:

 

1 level.wad   

The last map I made. I don't think it's bad, but nothing stands out for sure. It replaces doom2 map01.

4 levels.wad

They were built consequentially, map01 was the very first map I made, and so on. 

Map03 can't be exited, there's a mapping error that won't let you in the final area, but all the rest of the level is playable.

Map04, you can get stuck if you don't get red key at a certain point, but aside from that it's pretty ok. Probably the best level I made and the only one worthy of playing IMO.

They replace the first 4 levels of doom2.

 

About my topic question, do you still have your very first map? Do you have nostalgia if you play it?

Even the very best mappers must have "a first map", I was curious to know if you still have it and if you consider it good, bad or simply ok. 

I would love to play, for example, the very first map of the mappers I like, such as Gusta, Thomas van der Velden, Erik Alm and so on (even if they are not good, but they probably are).

maps.zip

[Empyre]

I do still have my first map.  It is included in my Empyrion as OLD01.  I included those old maps so anybody who is curious can see how much those maps have changed since I thought they were finished back in the 90s.

[LHSpanner]

God no, my very first maps were absolute shite.  I didn't even know how to close sectors properly, let alone texture anything.

Even if they had somehow survived from 20+ years ago, I wouldn't keep them.

[Roofi]

Yeah , I made it in 2013.

 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ftq37d71dk8cug3/Beginning.wad

 

[Capellan]

2 hours ago, Red-XIII said:

About my topic question, do you still have your very first map? 

 

No, I don't (though some poor fool probably does, if they have a 1994-era site rip of ftp.cdrom.com).  It sucked.

 

Some of my very, very early maps (like, in the first 10 I ever made) are still available at idgames, but they don't have my name on them and I am grateful for that fact, because they also suck :)

[DJVCardMaster]

Yes, 3 levels of The megawad I was working on 9 years ago, it changed a lot, still nothing worthy to show

[dobu gabu maru]

Yup.

 

 

Circled in red is the first room I ever made with Doom Builder. Of course this wasn't my first map released—this one took years of work—but it was fun returning to this map to work on it every now and then to see how much I've grown. Reminds me of how I used to just pull the ceiling down to the floor to create walls in some places, rather than deleting the sector outright. Good times.

[leodoom85]

If talking technically about your very first map ever made, then I don't. I only have my first released map though...

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=55822

[Pegleg]

Well, that depends.

 

Do you mean the first map I actually finished? If that's what you mean, then yes, I do have it, because I only started working on it in 2017 and it was released as part of DMP 2017.

 

If not that, do you mean the first map I worked on when I returned to Doom after my 16 year hiatus? Then, yes, I have it. It's on my hard drive at home. It's not finished, though.

 

But if you mean do I have the first maps I ever worked on? No, I don't. I started working on about 3 or 4 maps in 1994-95 for Doom 1 (KDiTD, specifically) and the furthest any of them got was about 50% before they became corrupted (somehow) and unusable. Those maps (or map fragments, you might call them) were deleted a long time ago.

 

There was an E3M7 map that I started probably in 1996 and worked on periodically when I was home from college between 1997 and 2000. As I recall, I almost had it finished; I was happy with most of the level, but I could never get the last room quite right. My intention was to have the final portal to Dis on top of a rocky outcropping in the middle of a lake of lava with a staircase that collapsed as you climbed it.

 

There's a slim chance that that map is still around if my Aunt still has that computer (my parents gave it to her ~15 years ago) and she hasn't erased everything on it.

[Breezeep]

If you're referring to the first map I've ever made for any game, it would be Half Life 2. I fiddled around a bunch of times in hammer editor with ambitious ideas, but I never got anywhere. As for doom related stuff, I still have my first released Doom map. (Be warned, it's not that good)

[Doomkid]

My first maps from scratch were made in 2001 but none have survived. They were all crude 1994-esque shit, one was New York with the twin towers still in tact (the attacks had literally just happened and my young self didn’t realise how tasteless such a map would be), one was an aeroplane staffed with SS nazis and featuring scrolling sky textures outside the window. Both were scrolling left of course so it looked like half of the plane was flying backwards. You started in a toilet. Good times.. I also edited Doom2 maps and dwango5 maps a lot back then, invariably making them worse.

 

My oldest surviving wad is “minidm.wad” from 2004, easily found with a google search. Bland sub-par mid-90s lookin’ deathmatch maps with offspring midis.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

My first maps are definitely lost to the ravages of hard drive nukes and website collapses.  As I recall for a while even in the beginning of the 21st century the computer I had could only backup to floppy disks, if I remembered to back things up at all, and all those disks are long gone to I don't even know where (along with a bunch of registered Apogee floppies that I wish I still had...)  I forget if my Geocities site actually had any WADs on it or not, it did have a few levels of some sort at one point but it might've been Soldat / Tapan Kaikki stuff which was easier to make.  I know I swapped a few WADs around on Doom Connector's chat back in the day though, that I didn't upload anywhere else except maybe to the aforementioned Geocities site.  So unless some Doom Connector packrat saved them somewhere, they're gone.  The earliest ones that I know survive are some silly little deathmatch maps released under an old handle.  To think that was more than 15 years ago now...

 

As far as what I remember about my first first map, it was your typical crappy first map.  What I recall for sure was that there was a room with a baron surrounded by barrels so you could see him blow himself up, and some wall that unintentionally became passthrough and I couldn't figure out how to fix it correctly so I just shrugged and put a secret behind it.  Also spectres in a dark windy hall.

[Gez]

No, they're all long-gone, but as far as I can remember, there were:

• My take on the DoomCAD tutorial map, which honestly was worse than the TUTGOOD.WAD example provided with the software.
• A recreation of the cathedral level from Shadowcaster, but with Doom textures of course, and various random craps off the passageways instead of teleports to other levels. Among said crap there was:
  • A long corridor filled with a row of barrels and a neighboring row of shotgun guys. Combined with a dehacked patch to set maximum shotgun ammo to several thousands, this made a very satisfying experience to dumbass teen me. First all the booms and splorches, then the great chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk etc. of running over all the dropped shotguns and picking them all up.
  • A twisty orthogonal maze. When you reached the end, the walls lowered (turning the maze into just a big rectangle room), and surprise! They were full of shotgunners!
  • A big-ass diagonal square spiral, each further segment going inward being lower and darker than the previous. It was packed full of imps. The exit was at the bottom.
• A Doom II metal castle made out of SPACEW4 and equivalent flat. The outer walls were "very" tall (like 512?) and lowered like lifts. Once on the walls you could lower the corner towers, which were even taller (768?). Once on the tower you could run and jump to cross the inner walls. Once in the inner walls I ran out of ideas so there was nothing else to do. I never even got to fill it with monsters.
• Some godawful attempt at playing Doom 1 and Doom II simultaneously by making it so that the exit of E1M1 led to the entrance of MAP01, and same for E1M2/MAP02. With some added nonsensical secrets. I think I abandoned the project upon reaching E1M3/MAP03 because I had no idea how to deal with problems such as locked doors and secret exits.
• A sewer tunnel map where I attempted to make the passageways cylindrical by using thin and long sectors. Looked horrible, but it did inspire a dream in which I found a really clever trick that allowed real sloped/curved surface in Doom! Then I woke up and couldn't remember what the trick was, very frustrating. (There was no trick, it was just a dumb dream.)

Suffice to say, it's not too sad these maps are lost. :p

[OliveTree]

My actual first maps, technically, and I made them chronologically too. But I've gone through over time and kept screwing with them. The actual "first map" has since been overwritten by later edits, and I didn't care to save older backups. Still functionally my first maps. It's a full megawad too, albeit the maps are pretty unimpressive and short.

[Jamie Faith]

Yes I do! But it's probably because I just made it lol

 

 

 

 

Shameless self plug I know

[Tristan]

Funnily enough I don't, but @Aquila Chrysaetos does. My first map was the old MAP07 of Doom 2 In Name Only, and it was present in the original alpha release which Aquila has for some reason I haven't played it since whenever I took it out of the project, so I guess that's about 6 years. Should have kept it in with mouldy's tune-ups tbh.

[crazyflyingdonut]

Yes, it's called "Building Escape" and it sucks. Even though I fucking hated Building Escape after it got a negative reception, I still have the original file from before I uploaded it to the Internet. I replay it from time to time to figure out what I could improve on whenever I decide to make another map.

 

I realize that I should probably spend a lot more time and effort on a map. Now I have to carry the burden of having an unpleasant map. The thing is, is that when I finished it, I thought it looked great.

 

I wanted a scenario where you escaped from an office building that was attacked by demons. With fire everywhere and alarms ringing, you would have had to be careful where you were going in the map. In the dark vents were spectre, just waiting to attack you while you struggle to break out of the vent and land in the bathroom, and eventually, go down the stairs to get out of the building.

 

I unintentionally ruined what would have been a great concept for a Doom map scenario. I will regret that for the rest of my putrid life.

[Dark Pulse]

Nope, can't find that anywhere, but I do have a standalone version of the second map that I made, which was horrible.

 

Dated August 23, 2008. Cripes.

 

I know I was using WadAuthor at the time. Nowadays, of course, I know a lot more stuff.

 

That said, I do still have some map layout ideas sketched onto graph paper, and one of these days, will maybe turn those into a "real" map.

[DMPhobos]

Yes i do, i have my first maps and they are awful and shitty, back when i was learning how to mod the game sometime in 2003/2004 i was more interested in what i could 'recreate in doom' rather than on doom itself, hence why my first mapping ventures were by taking maps already done and i would modify them and replace sprites or textures to fit them into a certain theme.

ship.zip
This little piece of crap might be my first completly original map that could be finished from beginning to end, it's supposed to be representing a ship from a certain show and i had replaced all the demon sprites for... uh... something else... i removed them, but i left some of the terrible computer sprites, including one that was supposed to be like the consoles in goldeneye lol. The map was done on DeepSea and you can tell, it was done by someone who had absolutely no idea how to use the editor and how doom maps work, it's quite broken.

dmr01.zip
The second one is different, this was my first 'Doom' map since it was actually themed around Doom and not something else, i was introduced to the 'doom in hexen format' and i discovered the 'thing_hate' special. It blew my mind that i could make things fight each other intentionally, so i did a map where a city gets invaded and there was a big battle. It was the 2nd map i ever did with Doom Builder, so it's quite improved over the last one, but it's still crap. I remade this map in 2007, and it was crap too

So uhh yeah, looking back at all the crap i had done over the years i realize that i didn't started to make decent maps until 2015/2016... damn

[Philnemba]

My first map was a unreleased crappy 94 noobish episode 2 theme map made with DoomCAD back in 2003.

 

Only thing I remember about it was the entire map spelled "PHIL" and was sadly lost from a hard drive crash of a near decade old PC around late 08/early 09 :(

[ketmar]

my first one was "2rooms1door", lol. i made it with DEU back in '96 (or something), and immediately decided that DEU sux, and i have to write my own editor. and my own engine. of course, i never did. and never finished any map since then, no matter how hard i tried.

[Reisal]

No, my first made map is long gone but you can find a list of my playable maps on my profile.

[Phobus]

I did a play through of my earliest surviving works in this thread on Doomer Boards January last year. They're built from my learning from Hank Leukart's Hacker's Guide to Doom and are remarkably simple. As mentioned in the thread, I'd made shapeless "things everywhere syndrome" blob maps before, but they didn't survive the march of time.

[Vermil]

I haven't got my very first map any more. But I remember I named it Areana9000 or something. I think I misspelt Arena and then decided to keep the name as it sounded unique.

 

I've still got a couple dozen maps or so from 1999-2000 though.

[Yugiboy85]

My very first map hmm? 

I wish I did but unfortunately, I don't :( 

 

It was on an old computer of mine and I don't have said computer anymore, nor can I recover the stuff from the harddrive.

 

I do remember it vaguely though. It was a map with zero doors, reason being I had no idea how to do them. It was just one big room with a bunch of monsters in it (it wasn't a square though, mind you, it actually had odd shapes and stuff). Not worth sharing from what I remember though, not worth sharing at all haha 

 

 

[Red-XIII]

10 hours ago, dobu gabu maru said:

Yup.

Holy cow that looks monstrous! I'll definitely try to play it.

 

It's nice to see that most of you still have your first map and that you remember all the stories about them, despite all the years.

I will try to take a peek at some of them.

[Misty]

All my maps from newbish tries to my recent maps are in the same folder(recent maps got new folder to not get lost). My first shared map was this one:
 

 

[Doom_Dude]

Ummm yeah, the very first map I worked on I put in a megawad I released in 2000 as map01 of 32. All made in the glory that is DoomCad. I refurbished the level quite a bit over the years for my upcoming Vilecore 2 release and it's now map02. The very first room I made is the square shape with the cross. For V2 I remade most of the maps (not all as there are new maps now) and it's now a UDMF project. So it's not just a remake like I originally intended. The idea is the player is sent back to the planet some 25 years later and the UAC have been busy expanding shit and finding new ruins n' stuff. Blah, blah, blah.

 

Here is a before and after screen.

[riderr3]

No, but I've spent couple of minutes to recreate it, because I remember 95% of map. It was 2009 and I running Linux machine and used Yadex Doom Editor (predecessor of Eureka Doom Editor). The map even didn't have an exit.

Huge dark starting room with inescapable nukage pit.


The door with non-unpegged door tracks leads to room with "keen's jail" and "window to nowhere".


To the left from player start was lift which leads to outside area with trees and imps.


It was my very first map, though not finished and deleted then.

[Deadwing]

The first map of moonblood was my first map ever, after around 50 iterations haha

Unfortunately, I don't have anymore the very first version, this is the oldest I've found so far: