How did you initially get into Doom mapping / modding / coding / etc?

Well most of my backstory its posted already in fonze thread :P but basically everything started when i was looking for another source port for doom (than Jdoom) and then found Zdoom and found how awesome was the port, after learning that zdoom can handle player custom skin. i made my own research on how to add them but i never was succeful on that until i meet DMphobos who know how to add them and after that i found doom connector and played a few coops with him, later that year i found by codeimp Doom Builder and there is were my mapping life start. my first maps where on the basic format, you know first under doom format doing crazy stuff like big square small town with lotsa monster around here and there that you werent unable to get out of the door and having fun with that shit coop wad i made with friends.

over time i learnt more about zdoom doom in hexen format and then i started to make my own private projects (some of them i posted it here Here) i never published any other wad mostly because i dont have confidence on myself as mapper, probably that have something to do with a bad experience in DooM Hispano Community where i never was welcome there and after such experience i believe that most of the Doom community were like them.

then after years with mapping and fun with my friend, we decided to make Darkmoon after so much inspiration froom Doom3. Phobos would take his part on some map and also on decorate while i just will do only mapping, we not only were a 2 man team, we also had Urric in our team to help us with missing textures that doom2.5 didnt have (like doors swichtes boxes) and some support on decorate from CASV, also some help in music from darkweaver (i think that was his nickname) but we never was able to finish the project. mostly because we made the big error of "Make a 32 megawad" and also because we keep doing maps and map that our map style changed a lot in those months here: http://darkmoon-doom.blogspot.mx/ can check how we changed a lot map01. and then we lost contact due the fall of our website free hosting provider and also because the death of MSN (i hate skype!) i still have contact with Urric, CASV but Phobos its the hard one to catch up :P

after that, i remember the old freedoom and how i like some of the textures and stuff, and when i learn they need some maps i joined here in doomworld and just make maps for freedoom (Map12,Map15,Map28, C1M5, C2M5). and ouf course trying to blend in this community by joining on small projects like Mayhem2048 or Plutinya1024.

And well thats my resumed story.

i was planning to work once again in Darkmoon and only a set of 8 maps since once i finish my doom64 style maps im going to have a lot of inspiration for Gzdoom format once again. and if Phobos like we can work it again on it.

Mapper origin stories?

I re-installed Doom again in maybe 2006/07, and I decided that it might be cool to make some levels to share with my small circle of online friends. I made a bunch of really bad maps that nobody played, and then one day I got brave and decided to make a submission to /idgames.

That submission ended up being Demonic Libido, which for god knows what reason ended up with 4/5 stars at around 25 votes. It's a massive piece of crap, but at the time its reception inspired me to make more maps. I made some more maps over the next couple years, some stuff for Pcorf Community Project, one map for the 1994 tune-up wad. Nothing really groundbreaking, but well received enough I guess.

Eventually I started hanging around people from #jetsons, who I shared some floaty layouts to. Esselfortium in particular generally praised my ability to make fun moving layouts, so I boldly attempted to make a map for Back to Saturn X. That ended up being Map05: Total Exposure, and the team seemed to like it. I guess you can call that my 'breakthrough' map...

Later I ended up joining D2TWID, which I made 3 maps for (The Boiler still easily being the best map I'll ever make). I think there have been other maps in between for smaller, less talked about projects. They're actually pretty good, in particular my map for HYMN, which is also my only Heretic map.

I think maybe now my most noteworthy work might be in The Adventures of Square? Who knows, I honestly still don't think anyone knows who I am. :P

I've actually got a bunch of unreleased maps sitting around on my dropbox, fully fledged and playable. They're pretty good too, but they're reserved for projects that will probably never see the light of day. Maybe I'll just release them standalone, dunno.

I guess in a nutshell I started mapping because it seemed like a fun thing to do, and eventually I ended up making something that other people actually regarded as "not a total piece of shit". And from there, I decided to keep making "not total pieces of shit".

Great story, the end!

Always was a fan of Doom. Had some breaks between the years of course.

When Zdoom and Brutal doom were released I ended up playing all the campaigns and chapters several times over again. Loved it.

But I wanted more, so I explored for mods. Oh my... Doom has a HUGE mod community. Quick to download and easy to install Wads? I'm in love.

Played a few unique maps and campaigns. Loved a couple of them, appreciated a few of them, the rest sort of felt like a choir. I kept seeking for maps that has the original doom like progression but taking advantage of modern Zdoom mechanics with custom monsters. Sadly 9/10 I found ended up with levels of 400+ enemies with overwhelmingly difficult custom creatures I couldn't even spend a moment appreciating. Some Wads had some amazing and complicated scripting but it was taken too far and no longer felt like a entertaining Doom game. So I was a little disappointed.

One day I got curious and checked for a map editor. Cool, yes is and it's a fairly simple one to use too! I always had a creative spark for map making too, since Warcraft and Counterstrike.

Ok I'm going to learn it and make a basic Doom map. Ok not bad, but this map needs lots of details (hours later) hmm I know I wanted a basic map but I want to add some scripts (hours of learning the basics of ACS), awesome I finally got it to work! hmm but I would like new content like monsters. (Hours of learning Slade), awesome but now I want to make 3D platforms, Slopes, add custom music etc etc etc.

4 Maps in, ok I'm making a Megawad haha.

I wanted to modify the content of Doom to suit my interest since I was 6 or 7. I was always drawing on sheets of white 8.5 x 11" printer paper different places where Doomguy would be, fighting off bad guys and collecting weapons. Graduallly, I was creating entire map-places, but completely disarmed of the knowledge of software to help express myself. So I drew and drew, and wrote and wrote countless stories and "encounters" once Doom 3 was released, I got pretty amplified. I knew I was born with a talent to create imaginary or virtual worlds, I just needed to find an appropriate outlet.

I discovered Doom Builder when I was 12. Then I picked it up again when I was 13 and thought, I can never understand all this. I don't have enough skill. 3 years later I was creating all kinds of crude shit you could play and say "yeah that was kinda fun". There was some creative impetus in my bones for as long as I had been introduced to games for personal computers running Microsoft. I ended up finding out my interests would branch out quite deeply into pencil and paper role playing games.

Doomkid said:

I haven't got a career based on it, but Doom modding and my first tip-toe into WadAuthor were certainly life changing moments :) I'm sure a lot of people here are very "close" to Doom/Doom modding in some way - Even those "too cool" to admit it. Also that unfinished project is awesome, far and away the best "Doom3 in Doom2"-style WAD I've seen, hopefully that doesn't meet the same fate as Ghostbusters Doom2 and end up never finished!

Hehe, thank's it really was an awesome proyect, and yeah, in my case, before doom i had never even heard about coding, or programing, so making zdoom mods introduced me to that, and while i never got good at making maps, i did got good at programing stuff (over the years i made a couple of "experiments" using doom as a base), im sure im not the only one who had a similar experience

Z0k said:

i was planning to work once again in Darkmoon and only a set of 8 maps since once i finish my doom64 style maps im going to have a lot of inspiration for Gzdoom format once again. and if Phobos like we can work it again on it.

Hell yeah man, Darkmoon needs to be done

Back in the day, I had an unofficial guidebook for Doom II, Heretic and Hexen. I might still have it somewhere, actually. But the point is, it shipped with a CD containing "the biggest collection of levels (WAD files), graphics, editors and materials for the games DOOM II, Heretic and Hexen that was ever released here [in Czech Republic]" and "more than 4000 new levels for all the games described in the book. Hundreds of utilities, editors, debuggers, maps, new sounds". Just your typical shovelware CD. I never touched this CD, because my father told me "it's additional levels" and the word "additional" sounded dangerous to 3-5 year old me.

Some years later, when I rediscovered Doom (through Duke3D), I inevitably also rediscovered the aforementioned CD, got a hold of WadAuthor and proceeded to hack crappy maps together with it. Made like 3-4 horrendous maps before moving on to Doom Builder. I planned to make an entire megawad like all newbies do. It was supposed to be this lengthy story about an asteroid populated by furries (I called them cat people, because I didn't know that furries are a thing) who get their base invaded by demons and that's pretty much the whole story. However I quickly gave up on that shit and moved on to spewing out experimental test maps with misused ZDoom features, and later, decorative gameplay-less maps abusing the features to hell and back.

I still have all my early maps. Not going to release any because they range from random ideas to unfinished megawad remnants to weird unexplainable crap.