Zero to Hero

We have a lot of awesome mappers here at Doomworld. They are continually making great maps. But everyone has to start from somewhere.
To anyone who is considered a great mapper,
I want to know how bad/good/awesome/weird your first maps were and how you got to making the good maps you make today.

Purpose: To inspire horrible mappers like myself to make better maps.

Thank you.

My first map was almost completely a series of rooms connected by corridors. There's not much more to say about it. :P Just look at other people's work and see what works for you. I looked at Eternal's stuff myself.

I started playing with Doom editors when I was 9 or 10, so I think my first map was a single FIREWAL-textured blob sector stuffed with monsters. It's the earliest one I can remember, at least, haha.

(It's still the best map I've ever made, obv.)

I work backwards, I started out with awsome maps, nowdays I'm only releasing shit maps. I miss the old days when I wasn't in contact with a Doom community, and was using different editors. Back then my maps were old school, they were a bitch to make with the editors I used back then. I wish I could go back in time :)

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/61831-my-wad-doom-0-alpha-im-also-new-to-the-forum/

I was thinking about my first adventures in Doom mapping a few days ago. Sadly most of my first maps are long gone (unless I can find them on my old HDD that's buried away). The oldest one I have is this, which is relatively new next to my first maps. I'd love to get a hold of my old maps, but I don't think that's gonna happen.

My very first "map" was something I made in DeePsea and was akin to something like wow.wad, but stupider. I couldn't figure out how to make a room within another room. So what I ended up doing using midtextures (I think) to make the walls of the inner room. But that didn't really work because I had no concept of impassible lines, so you could walk through the walls....which confused me to no end. I seem to remember Doom95 didn't really like my midtexture walls either...there were some weird HOMs (could have been an unclosed sector, but I don't remember). And then outside of that was a gargantuan outdoors area, but with no sky because that was way beyond me. In this outdoor area was a single, lonely Cyberdemon. That's about all I can remember.

Because I'm slow to learn and easily discouraged, I didn't attempt another map for another year or so :P

My first editor I used was a shareware version of DoomED, where I was limited to 25 sectors. So I could create small maps, and thats what I did. So if I remember correctly, my first map had a square starting room with a teleporter that took you to a even bigger square room. And in that room I used pretty much all Doom monsters and placed them on platforms with different heights. And sat back and watched them infight eachother. ROCKRED all over the map and RROCK01 as floor and ceiling textures. It even had an exit switch. Funny enough back then I thought I created the best map ever.

Later on I switched to Windeu 5.24, and my maps grew and got better. Even though Windeu is fucking evil for crashing after two hours editing without saving. My keyboards had a rough time back then :p Oh those days, awsome and a nightmare thinking back to that time.

My first map wasnt a big thing anyway, i made just two rooms with lot of doors holding enemies, but i made it just to know how to make doors and connect rooms and how many space enemies need to roam around the map.

still the next maps were just weird things with the common thing of many enemies in one place and stuff like that. not great thing in design but for sure me and my friend have fun testing my earliers maps in coop.

i like when i try the first maps or wads of my friends, because even if i know the flaws (rare texturing, hundreds of enemies in a room, etc) but they have some neat ideas for their wad since they are starting to release that creativy, but of course not all its rainbows and candies, i also tell them what they should do to improve, but always with constructive comments, not hate comments like "bad ditch it you suck" thats the worst thing you can do for a mapper that its barely starting.

at this date i still kept my first wad i made with 18 or 19 maps when i start to learn how to map and get better everytime (but maps 01 and 02 are not the original). i always give my friends that wad to show them how they will improve each time they map and to help them avoid the worry about the look of their maps.

I recently unearthed some old screenshots of my questionable first attempts, so I'm going to pretend I'm a big deal.

Experimenting with skybox viewpoint:
http://i.imgur.com/01TyNFx.png
http://i.imgur.com/42qYFOQ.png

Possibly the first "serious" attempt:
http://i.imgur.com/wU6UtVk.jpg

The door was leading to an unfinished observation room of sorts, the draft ended there:
http://i.imgur.com/CBw4qMo.jpg

An attempt to detail Entryway:
http://i.imgur.com/D1Ce48H.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UM4Wsak.jpg

I was pulled into a project and made a forest path with a sector car:
http://i.imgur.com/roJPiBe.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5CsNwsA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hxITmHz.jpg

Then the project died, of course. I don't remember a single project that did well after my inclusion (except maybe Monochrome Mapping Project, it depends on your definition of "well").

This is all from around 2005. The accelerated engine is ZDoomGL. I haven't made a finished map until 2013 (an awsum success story).