Page Text: What inspired you to be a doom mapper, mod maker ect.
Cacodemon187 replied to xScavengerWolfx's topic in Doom General
Well, it was around 2013 I think, I was 8 and hangin' out with my dad. I don't remember how, but he asks me: "Do you know Doom?" and welp, the rest is history. The first time I played Doom was on a random website we found, we just googled "play doom" and that came up. It was the shareware episode with no music, just the sound effects. I vividly remember the item pickup sound, I loved it back then! I also remember my dad telling me to never choose the Ultra-Violence difficulty. To me it was like this mystic secret setting that I was not worthy to unveil, but as the obedient little boy I was, I obliged. And yes, I also noticed the suspicious black spot on the Imp's sprite :) Anyways, a couple weeks later my dad got Doom 95 and a Doom 2 copy in the PC. I could play the rest of the game, with music this time! Some more weeks later, a friend of my mom gave me Skulltag in a pendrive, along with some 90's wads I can't find at all now. The only one I've found is Coloseum, the rest were named COLO1.wad, COLO2.wad, all the way to COLO6.wad. One of the COLO wads had an Enter Sandman midi, and my dad suggested that Romero himself had stolen music from Metallica, not understanding what custom content was. To be fair, I didn't know what it was either lol Some time later, I was looking up Doom videos on YouTube, and came across this video which introduced me into Minecraft, but that's a whole other story. Some more browsing later, and I found Doom Builder 2!! 8 year old me was absolutely thrilled at the idea that "I can create my own DOOM MAPS?!?!" I instantly looked up DB2, installed it and got mappin'. My very first attempt was a map named "DEATH", as in, the mapslot itself was 'DEATH' I thought the Level name configuration was the actual name of the map lol Here's a recreation of what it looked like. I didn't know how to change the grid size, my doors had W1 actions, I thought the sky textures were the actual sky in the map, and I was very scared of using the gore decorations. Anyways, after creating classics such as "pan de demonio.wad" (I thought pandemonium meant demon bread in spanish), I decided to look into the Iwad maps to see how it all worked. I remember using the 'copy action specials' tool to have doors and lifts in my maps, and saving edited iwads so I could have more than one map in my wads. Eventually, I started looking up mapping tutorials, all in Hexen format of course. I copied the rooms they made line by line as practice, and learned about Hexen's cool lighting specials. After that, I started trying to finish real maps that I could show to my dad on sundays. I named these wads "i love you dad.wad" and other sweet names <3 I would play them with him next to me, he had motion sickness so he couldn't really play them on his own. These maps were very linear, they had 3d floors, scripted color lighting (ew), deep water effects, the whole nine yards. After a couple months, I started a project named "ocean of mistery.wad". It was going to be a full Doom 1 megawad, four episodes of pure carnage, explosions, oceans, and yes, mystery. Surprisingly, I made it up to E4M3 before I gave up, and as far as I remember, these maps weren't all that bad. The first level had you take a boat to a fort in the middle of the sea, then to a techbase, then to a volcano and finally a cyberdemon duel. The second episode was set in snow based on the intermission screen, the third one was in hell, and you can guess how the fourth one went. Now, it was 2018. The government gave my school free laptops for all the students, which was convenient cuz my old laptop was like 7 years old now. I was transfering my stuff from my old laptop to my new one, and I came across my ancient Doom directory. I wasn't too into mapping anymore, so I just straight up DELETED EVERYTHING that I had made. No hesitation, just pressed Del on my keyboard and done. To this day, it's the biggest regret of my life. So many maps, so many memories gone. The only wad that survived was one from 2017 that I had on my pendrive for some reason, and I plan on releasing it along with other unfinished maps of mine soon. So... That's it. I've known Doom for more than half of my life now, and It's inspiring how passionate the community is and was even in it's early days. Hopefully you enjoyed my long story with this game :)