How do you get ideas for new maps?

[Canofbacon]

Title pretty much says it all. I personally just play other WADs until I get a new idea.

[Ribbiks]

1) randomly draw shapes in doombuilder until something clicks
2) pick a color / texture-theme and just run with it
3) attempt to recreate scenery (from pictures of natural environments, or fictional places in movies or something)
4) shamelessly steal ideas from other wads. your own design sensibilities will inevitably creep into the process of recreating memorable snippets of other maps, and you'll hopefully end up with a whole new thing.

[ArmouredBlood]

Listen to music, get a cool idea for a theme and style of map.
Be inspired by some game to make something in that style.
Come up with a fight idea, make it. Detailing is iffy with this (most of ngmvt1 was this).
Draw it out on paper. It can be a bit more artistic than what it translates to in the editor.

[joe-ilya]

I take a random wolfenstain map.
And turn it into doom , with heights , connections , wideness , pillars and lot's more stuff like detail or texturing and additional actions.

[Memfis]

I curse god, he sends me to hell and I check out the architecture.

[Tristan]

I improvise

[Rayziik]

Almost all, if not all, of my map ideas come from dreams. It's strange, like I see the map in all it's glory within the dream, and then my objective as a mapper is to recreate the map piece by piece until I feel the map is true to the dream. Sometimes even better than the dream itself.

I think my extremely poor sleeping habits make these dreams almost closer to hallucinations, either way, I roll with it.

[Acid]

Force mapping.

[CorSair]

Usually what I do:
Draw basic layout of map -> play your mind how you envision it -> create -> rethink your map -> create -> rethink your layout -> create -> think about gameplay -> just create -> keep pondering -> Uh, does this need something more? Create -> say: "Now how this came so fucked up?" -> start over


Currently, I just grab some ripples of thoughts that just comes up and do wad from that. See how it goes...

Another one is to just force it out. Burns your brains and inspiration somewhat.

[Antroid]

I think of a place, setting, or just atmosphere that I would like to capture and then try to fit that into a doom map somehow. I have no idea how I do layouts, they are usually pretty simple in my case, and probably always dictated 90% by what sort of place I'm depicting. I guess I close my eyes and try to visualise a picture of this place or a sequence of walking through it and then try to transfer the general idea into doom geometry.

That is all ideally, of course, and a lot of time it's not quite that inspired and I just keep the general idea in mind and draw whatever shape seems neat from top-down view. Sometimes I even base some of it around the gameplay I want to have, but that is bizarre for me and happens rarely.

I honestly can't even imagine making a map from scratch without a solid idea for it's setting or mood, just coming up with a random layout and working from there like people say here. I can't do that at all.

[C30N9]

Play other wads and play music.

EDIT: And drawing on paper.

[Jayextee]

I just draw shapes on paper and try to work out gameplay from it.

Or, I crib layouts I've already done before because my idea of a 'remake' seems to be 'barely recognisable and only loosely based on something'.

[MFG38]

I get ideas for new maps pretty much randomly, mostly inspired by another WAD.