Hi. I'm Wes, I'm 16, I live in Wisconsin, and I've been making Doom levels since I was 13, which is longer than I've been doing pretty much anything else except breathing. Everybody at the computer store tells me Doom is dead and I should be making Quake II maps. I have tried. Quake II mapping is like building a ship in a bottle with oven mitts on. Doom mapping is just lines on graph paper, and then you get to walk around on your graph paper and shoot things. I'm not done with it yet.

Below are all the levels I've finished, oldest first, with my honest opinion of each one. Honest means the first one gets a bad review. I built it when I was 13. Be nice.

Everything is for Doom II. I test every map in plain old doom2.exe, because if it runs there it'll run anywhere, and then I test it again in Boom to make sure nothing weird happens.

My house. Everybody's first level is their house, it's like a law. I measured the rooms with a tape measure and then found out one Doom unit isn't anything in particular, so the kitchen is the size of an airplane hangar and the hallway is too narrow for the player to fit through. I fixed the hallway by making it three times wider than the real one. My room has a Baron of Hell in it, which my sister thought was funny and I thought was accurate. There are missing textures everywhere and when you look out the back door you get the hall-of-mirrors smear. I'm keeping it because you have to remember where you started.

A water pumping station that's been taken over, with big tanks of green nukage in the middle and catwalks going around them. This is the first map where I figured out skill levels, so it's actually fair on the easy settings now. The big moment is when you hit the switch to drain the main tank and it lowers to show a room full of imps standing in the empty tank looking up at you. My friend Andre screamed. That's the best review I ever got.

Problems: too much brown. I used BROWN1 on like half the walls because it was the first texture in the list I liked.

This one goes in the MAP07 slot on purpose. In Doom II, MAP07 has a special rule built in: when every Mancubus on the level is dead, any sector tagged 666 lowers, and when every Arachnotron is dead, any sector tagged 667 rises. So I built a steel foundry with molten slime channels, and every time you finish off a wave of fat guys the floor of the pouring room drops and opens the next area. Then when the Arachnotrons are all dead a staircase rises out of the slime to the exit. Nobody who played it figured out what was making the floors move until I told them, which I think means it worked.

Warning: there's a spot in the pouring room where if you look the wrong way on the big open floor, plain doom2.exe crashes with a visplane overflow. I've fixed it twice and I think it's fixed now. If it crashes on you, tell me exactly where you were standing.

A meat-packing warehouse, dark, cold-looking, with the gray metal textures and lots of hanging stuff from the Doom II decorations. The whole point is the lighting. I spent more time on the light levels than on anything else I've ever done. There are rooms where the light flickers and you can just barely see the Spectres moving, and one freezer where the lights go out when you pick up the blue key. It's more creepy than hard. My mom played it (on I'm Too Young to Die) and said "that's disgusting, Wesley" which I am counting as a good review.

My first try at a set of three maps that connect. You start in a train yard at night, go through a switching tower, and end up underground in a subway tunnel where things have gotten into the walls. The hard part is that Doom can't put one room on top of another, so the tower is a bunch of tricks with stairs and teleporters to make you think you're going up floors. MAP01 is done and my testers liked it. MAP02 has an Arch-vile in it that everybody hates, which is the point, but maybe I'll move him.

I get asked this a lot. There are no downloads on this page. My parents have a rule that nothing goes up on the Internet with my name on it until they've looked at it, and they can't really look at a WAD file, so that's where we are. Also, honestly, I'd rather know who's playing them.

So here's the deal: e-mail me at [email protected] and tell me which level you want. I'll send it as an attachment. All I ask is that you write back and tell me what you thought, including the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff. If you find a bug, tell me the map, the skill level and where you were standing.

My testers so far: Andre, my cousin Matt, a guy named Pieter in the Netherlands who plays everything on Nightmare and still finds it too easy, and my mom (see level 4).