I’d love to hear your feedback on what textures you felt like you were missing as you made the map. I noticed a few original DOOM textures in the play through video!
The 64 heights and the lack of textures that tile well vertically was the main constraint (but kinda fun to work with). It works okay for hallways, but for rooms I wish I had taller textures to work with to avoid repetition. The pack provides plenty of support and light textures, but they all have a hard seam when repeated vertically. Except for the rivet bar which I feel I had to overuse a bit. Having textures with metals panel covering the full height would have helped there.
I used original graphics for switches as the textures pack lack(ed) any (except for the one on the door, which is too small as a standalone switch). I also extended the pack with a blue light and door, a door without a switch/control pad and a screen usable as a switch.
Globally the pack was great. Using it for the hallways was a pleasure, I started with that and I got a pretty good result in my first couple hours of mapping.
I really should try making some DOOM levels, I’m just not sure where to start tbh.
This is my first Doom level (except maybe for an unreleased two rooms level in the 90’s), so I had to learn from scratch. I only had a good understanding of how the original Doom engine worked, which I guess helped a bit. I watched a couple tutorial video on Youtube (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EucWtn__O8Q and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4-5d10dCyQ, etc.). And a incredibly amount of time lurking on mapping channels on Doom Discord servers (mostly #map-making on The Entryway server and the Hellforge Studio server). The ZDoom wiki is also a must. Ultimate Doom Builder and SLADE are the tool of the trade. If you are not on Windows, they work fine with Wine or a virtual machine.
To be able to use your textures pack, you will want to target GZDoom (so your aren’t limited to the original 256 colors palette). So you might as well go with the pk3 format to bundle resources and the UDMF map format which allow for a lot more features (like floor/ceiling textures rotation and offset).