Stories on how you got into modding, your first map, etc

[Xyos212]

I thought it would be interesting to see how we all got into modding. Our first map, or project, and how we went from there.

I started off around when HL2 came out with a CS 1.6 map. I just had the "Cool awesome idea" of making my own house and a few neighbors houses as a map! Ya I know, every newbie wants to make their school, or house, or something like that, but I was one of those guys. At the time all my friends were in love with CS 1.6. I loved it as well and was really interested in the custom maps players made, and how it was done.

I knew very little about mapping. I remember one big obstacle I had was actually setting the config up for Hammer, directories, etc. I finally was able to make a square checkered room, and I remember jumping up and down with my brother, doing push ups on the floor out of the excitement of creating an actual walkable space to move around in. I know its stupid, but I was younger and just the thought of being able to create something you can play inside of I thought was amazing and really fulfilling (still do).

From there I actually looked up .WADS and creating custom WAD paks. I took some photos of things in my yard like wooden fences, grass, etc and made them into crappy badly photoshopped textures. I made my house, front yard, backyard, and a couple houses on each side. Released it as de_household for CS 1.6 and was just overjoyed. Now the map had no optimization to speak of, and I believe the compile time took a full day on a pentium 4 processor, but it was complete and from there I just had so much passion and excitement.

LOL I actually found the old link when I uploaded the map! Unfortunately past me didnt include the custom .wad files :/
http://twhl.info/vault.php?map=3608

Well thats my story on my first map. I think we see a lot of people who want to re-create a known area like a house or school in modding because at least for me, its cool to see somewhere in the world you know intimately come to life in a virtual game.

[Dives]

My first experiences with mapping was making awful maps for Marathon Infinity when I was ten. Later I did some modding with Escape Velocity Nova, making a mod which added added a hypergate to the Sol system. And now I've just shocked myself by finding the mod still exists here (named HG-Sol). That description makes me cringe.

I got into Source mapping in late 2005, pretty much just dicking around with it for a year. My first serious project was to create my High School. I got a lot done but was too inexperienced to get around the Source BSP maximums (what mapper hasn't reached maximum t-junctions?). After I gave up on that I mostly didn't touch Hammer much until L4D came out.

[Generalvivi]

this thread, so much to say.

I'll just cut it short. I love modding. I do it everyday, I'm doing it right now as I type this post.

[Ark11]

I just loved the idea of greating worlds and games so back in around 2008 or 9 I started to teach myself how to map for Star Wars JK2 on the shitbox of a program GTKRadiant. Spent about a year on that program learning the fundamentals of game design and how the level editor programs work. Then when I played Portal I thought it would be cool to map for that so I downloaded the SDK and started and have been perfecting my skill ever since. My first (and only released) map is DE_Archive for CS:S, a small little map that is actually pretty fun to play on (me and some other 'lopers played a heap of rounds on it once, it was really fun). I'm currently working on a hostage map for CS:GO but I haven't got the slightest clue when it will be done.

[Stormy]

My first mod was on my friends computer. He went out somewhere and I stayed at home playing CS:S on his PC. I thought it would be funny to change all the sounds to me talking. "pew pew" etc. I guess this was my first mod. But I'm just repeating myself

I did a jig of excitement the other day when I got an extremely shitty gravity and collision system working on a square in 2d, in ruby of all languages. I don't think the over-excitement due to trivial things ever leaves, and that's how I know I still love modding/development. Strange thing is it's always the trivial things that excite me. You should have seen my reaction when I got that little square to jump.

[Sarwia]

I played the demo - Half-Life Uplink - when it was released. After the credits a web page appeared with information on Half-Life and its level editor. Even though I didn't speak english at the time I understood that you could make your own maps. After that I spent almost a year looking for the game and two more years after that getting the editor properly configured That's almost 13 years ago now.

Still love it.

[Hollow]

Discovered the Worldcraft editor after I got Half-Life Generations back on CD, and began tinkering with mapmaking from that point onwards. At least 10 years now. Made maps of my room/school, areas in my city etc. Made maps for timesplitters with the crappy prefab pieces...and slowly it snowballed into bigger things.

By the time I hit 16/17 I discovered actual modding teams, worked on a few shitty "newbie's first own hl2-related mod" called Downfall. Obvioulsy it never saw the light of day. This was around the time I was finishing High School...making full use of the printer in IT class to print off interlopers & The Snarkpit tutorials (I still have a folder of like 500 pages somewhere at my first home).

Used to be known as Chaffing_Weasel back then, I was a douche, but in time you gain maturity and two-way respect for the community kicks in. I eventually switched to my current lopers account 'TheHollowNight' in 2008 - which was the screen name for my music projects and it stuck for all things online - but everybody just calls me Hollow.

I started entering Interlopers design challenges occasionally and pimping maps here and there, never really released that much but seemed to have gained a reputation for a love of intricate detail & lighting. I eventually joined forces with Major Banter, another long serving Loper (plus a few others), to work on Field Zone (now morphed into Stroll). Though the mod was mis-managed, due to us being pretty young, it was a great learning experience, I got efficient at making textures and environment design.

I was loosely involved with S.T.T.R, funky/intriguing mod by peegee, did some music tests and level design feedback, yadda yadda.

I started getting a whiff of interest in a secret project some of the veteran Interlopers were working on, led by Tay (Or Kremator to most). It was CANVAS, a pretty substantial total conversion, and one that made a pretty decent impact beyond even the modding scene. I was highy inspired (and still am) by Tay's very bold imagery and design, sharing a lot of similar tastes in aesthetic and areas of influence. No surprises he used to win all of the Lopers design battles he entered into. I basically pestered the shit out of him until he let me join the team back in 2009 (?).

After we released the Canvas trailer, I started applying for industry jobs and struck lucky. Landed a Level Designer position on Forza Horizon. I continued to stay in touch with modding, working again with Tay and the rest of the remaining Canvas crew (who had recently merged with the City 17: Episode 1 dudes). We released Black Snow, which did pretty darn well in the Let's Play scene. I contributed to bits and bobs here and there, also branching out equally into environment art.

Which brings me to today, 24 years of age, still plugging away at many projects.
I am currently working on The Crew for PS4/XB1/PC, A CSGO map which I am looking to finish over the next few months (no, seriously).

And lastly, a very awesome indie project, that the Black Snow team have been working on for some time (We're now known as Monothetic), making this the 3rd major project I've worked on with some of the same peeps. I am super excited for this one

I can't stress enough how much this site has helped me grow as a creative individual, and how awesome it is to see many other community members now working on fantastic games in the industry or projects of their own. I really hope that the introduction of Source 2 injects a burst of life back into the site, because the last year or two has seen it slightly stagnate - not a fault of the community - making me drift over to Mapcore more occasionally (TRAITOR).

TL:DR - keep working on shit til you get lucky.

[DonPunch]

Gonna date myself here, but I started with my brother back in the 90's modding Duke Nukem 3D. My brother started on an old ANSI game called ZZT (one of the 1st games by the company that became EPIC games).

So yeah, 20 years ago...

[marnamai]

Lego fueled my love and interest in creating stuff. I had interest in doing maps for games but never really did anything with it, I messed around with red faction editor but was quick to give up on that.

When HL2 was announced I allmost checked daily for news on it, I found interlopers by accident, printed a shitload of tutorials from it :p

Only the year after HL2 was released I started to mess around with hammer doing crappy HL2 deathmatch maps.
Eventually joined subvertus with allmost no prior sp mapping experience. Failed pretty bad. Went solo after it and I 've been hammering away at my own single player mod attempts ever since.

[Gambini]

Gonna date myself here, but I started with my brother back in the 90's modding Duke Nukem 3D. My brother started on an old ANSI game called ZZT (one of the 1st games by the company that became EPIC games).

So yeah, 20 years ago...

Bet you there! I´ve started "modding" with Rise of the Triad and Doom 2, one year before Duke was released!

[tripmind]

Before I touched source I wasn't really modding at all. I was however making remakes of marathon 1 maps in Halo 3's crappy forge mode, using simple glitches that let you geomerge large boxes in order to create more complex geometry, it was fun and I probably logged a few hundred hours going through this ridiculous arduous process just to make something interesting in Halo 3. Had alot of friends on XBL that played custom games every night so they got some playtesting, was fun. Halo 3's custom game community was about as large as CSS's custom map community was at one point, however as the game started dieing, people wanted things like a game browser that would allow people hosting custom games to find player more easily. Bungie basically said "we can't do that, just use XBL's friend system", and so it died.




Before that I tryed my hand at messing around with Staredit in SC:Broodwar, and it was cool, although I never made anything with it.

What really got me into source mapping would definitely be CSS. I spent countless hours on surf servers, minigames, jailbreak, zombie escape, all that fun stuff, and eventually I discovered interlopers through shit map night and i got into it from there.

[Jman]

I made flash games when I was like 9, or at least I think that was my age, I was in grade 6 at the time when I made a full flash game and continued making stuff with it until I was 11 and my brother played a custom css map his friend made. I asked his friend how he did it and he showed me hammer and I never really looked back. Learned basic modelling and programming at 13 and did it like 8 hours a day since I just enjoyed it and especially testing things with friends.

I still have everything from 10 years ago when I started saved on a hard drive, it was fun doing a mini shit maps thing with some friends where we just played like the 20 or 30 terrible css maps I made during my first few years.

[Text_Fish]

After playing Quake 1 religiously for about a year I almost shat myself with excitement; walking in to Electronics Boutique and seeing a copy of Deathmatch Maker (http://www.mobygames.com/game/deathmatch-maker) on the shelf. That was probably one of the most important purchases I ever made, and I still go back and map for Quake 1 from time to time, albeit using Worldcraft 3 these days.

[Sathor]

I guess everything begins with LEGO and sand castles. I am actually sitting at the same beach right now on which I built dozens of sand castles in my childhood. Anyway, in 2001 Operation Flashpoint was released, with this nice editor. I only got access to the internet myself in 2002, so a friend and me shared stuff on discettes early on. Custom missions and so on. For our two guy lan parties I built fun maps for us two, often hiding superior giant robots for myself in a forest. Ha.

I published quite a few missions, but I mainly did scripting and modelling later. I used the modelling program that came with OFP. Needless to say, the models were complete crap, alrhough they looked decent enough.
The scripting was better. I released two tutorials, one specific on camera scripting.

I never quite quit modding until today. There have been pauses of cause. I didnt really mod many games either. It was mainly OFP and Source. I began to work with Hammer only in perhaps 2006. I registered here in 2007, the year I made abitur. Since then I have done a lot of mapping, modelling, texture creation and other stuff. But never finished much.
Began de_investment about a year ago with the fixed aim to finally get something done and it seems I will make it this time.

[nub]

Back in 2005, shortly after the release of HL2 and CSS, I was part of a CSS clan. We had a regular on our servers that had been mapping since GoldSRC and was already working with the Source SDK as soon as it came out. He created a map and the clan I was in hosted it on the server.

I hadn't thought designing my own levels for CSS was possible prior to playing his map, and I asked him how he did it. He basically got me started by showing me how to download the SDK and whatnot. From there it was just experimentation, tutorial reading, and massive amounts of trial & error. I discovered Interlopers only a few weeks after starting and registered. And yeah that's pretty much it.

No pictures of my first map though. But basically it was a giant fucking box (with a wooden crate texture), AWPs, some random ass cover thrown about the map, a mote, and a tower in the very center. No lighting, obviously.