Sonderamine
In a general sense, gaming is great for relaxation and fun. I played many video games during my childhood and adolescent years—and maybe you have as well. I dove into titles such as Halo: Reach, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Battlefield 4, War Thunder, and so many more. Yet, among the sea of games I played, one consistently stuck out from the rest: Garry's Mod (GMOD). As a kid back in 2016, I watched YouTubers play this game with legendary addons like the SCP-173 mod, M9K, and SCars. When I finally received the game from my family around that time, I was ecstatic. I played for hours on end, both on multiplayer servers and alone in sandbox mode. I would goof around on DarkRP and SCP-RP—meeting great friends along the way—while also being "serious" when playing Military RP, Star Wars RP, and all kinds of Nutscript-based servers. It was the wild west of GMOD. Everyone was trying out chaotic new server ideas, creating custom content, and working with the few decent addons available on the workshop. This was an era that long pre-dated well-defined, massive modern mods like LVS, ARC9, or PM0V3. Yes, we had simfphys and TFA, but they were just starting out. Seeing the landscape as a young, arrogant, and ambitious kid, I decided to start my own modding journey in the summer of 2018 and haven't looked back since.
Under the sweltering summer heat, I booted up my computer and opened a program called hammer.exe. A large icon appeared on my screen while the mouse buffered, followed by a massive white window. Four grid viewports were centered on the screen, surrounded by a daunting plethora of buttons and toolbars. I clicked the top-left file button and created a new map... utter blackness filled all four boxes. Having no earthly idea what to do next, I searched for a tutorial. I slowly learned camera movement and the basic creation of geometry (referred to in the engine as "brushes"). I pressed Z on my keyboard, and suddenly, I was moving the camera. In the top-right window, I drew out a cube with my mouse and pressed enter. I've done it! My first ever brush had manifested. From there, I got straight to work making my first map: a capital ship from Star Wars (a Munificent-class frigate). I sculpted the exterior, threw together a basic interior, and plastered it with default Half-Life 2 textures. It was extremely blocky and crude. There was no complex geometry, Z-fighting scattered about, nodraw wasn't utilized, and I didn't even include a skybox. Yet, although it looked like a steaming pile of junk, my kid brain was incredibly proud. I knew that I now possessed the tools to (hopefully) build anything I wanted. I wanted to develop insane-looking maps and foster a true game developer skillset. Between 2018 and 2020, I strived to create more maps, getting better with each compilation while still remaining admittedly amateur compared to the veteran mappers of the era.
Now in the current era, I've learned countless lessons, optimization techniques, and hidden secrets of Hammer and the Source SDK over my almost 8 years of mapping. There are endless ways to light a scene, ranging from placement to color theory. There are a million ways to design a single corridor. Do you want constantly changing points of vertical elevation? Flat ground? A steady dip? You are at the helm of your creation. Along the way, I've made plenty of friends and shared many late-night laughs. Sometimes you're tracking down an unexplainable compile issue, or maybe someone just accidentally slapped a nodraw texture on a displacement face. Of course, there have been intensely frustrating times as well. Countless software crashes, corrupted files, and moments consisting of pure software "bugification" (especially when using the CARVE TOOL INCORRECTLY). I've built maps with settings ranging from 1400s England all the way to the year 2552 in the Halo universe. I've published many maps, and abandoned countless more. My most successful and proud achievement was gm_kylig, published back in 2023. Although I haven't published a major project publicly over the last 3 years, I've kept sharp by creating small personal maps. Overall, I've been busy with university, organic chemistry research, and spending time with my buds. I hope to publish on the workshop again someday, even if GMOD eventually fades into the internet graveyard as a fond stepping stone for players of a bygone era. In the end, mapping in the Source Engine has been an incredibly uplifting, fun, and engaging cornerstone of my life.
