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Name: Tyler Terrell
Hometown: Oshkosh, WI
Birthdate: November 12, 1982
Interests: Mapping, graphic design, mathematics, philosophy, music, art, science fiction, programming, and too many more to list
Skills: Creativity, mathematics, humor, and understanding

Hello, and welcome to my biography. I have created this page to help you to learn a little more about me, my interests, and my skills. Through this section of the page, I hope you can get to know me better, and appreciate me for my abilities.

I've been interested in video games since I was a small child, and ever since I got my first Intellivision I've wanted to pursue a career in that field. Now, a lot of people say they want to make video games, but I literally dream about it. I've been interested in character concepts, storylines, plot twists, battle systems, and 3d modeling and mapping for as long as I can remember. In my spare time, I would draw pictures of interfaces from games I hoped to someday create.

When I discovered Day of Defeat (a WW2-style Half-Life modification) in 2001, I became obsessed with it. I played it every day, and met many interesting people through the game, which has integrated voice chat. When I found out that the software to create maps and levels in DoD was free and could be downloaded at any time, I immediately did so and began to teach myself the complexity of brush-based mapping. I created many crappy maps in my early days as a mapper, and didn't release much. I found it much harder to complete a project than it was to think of new ones. But I pushed myself to get one done, and finally released a map called dod_mansion. Many of my fellow gamers will remember this map, which became unplayable when DoD was updated some years later. It was basically a huge mansion, which tested the limits of the DoD engine, and in fact performed quite badly on some people's machines. Nonetheless, it was a very unique map to DoD at the time, and people enjoyed playing it.

However, some time later I had a hard drive crash, and had my first experience with not backing up my stuff....I lost mansion. All my work was gone. But while I had lost the ability to edit my first map, I had learned a lot about how mapping worked.

I applied this knowledge to my second map, dod_kingofhill. This map was a knife-only map centered around a large hill. It was very simple, but yet required a lot of entity-work to allow it to work properly. The map was not an immediate success, and I became discouraged, but quickly realized that all I had to do was make it more interesting. So, I completely revamped the level and added tons of new brushwork (much more complex than the original hill), as well as changed it to a pistol map instead of just knives. People enjoyed this a lot more, especially when they figured out that I had placed several hidden weapons throughout the level, which made it that much more interesting. I also had included in this map a dance-club type area, which had ambient music, and crazy lighting. I textured in some pictures of the members of my clan (which was the first time I had messed with textures), and they loved it. They liked that they were immortalized in a level of the game they so much enjoyed.

After having completed this map, I didn't really know where to go next. I had created many, many drawings of maps I would have liked to work on, but couldn't decide on which one to use. This began a period in my mapping career when I started many maps, but finished none. It lasted about two years, before I finally realized that what I really needed was to dedicate myself to one project at a time, and stop jumping from idea to idea. Enter dod_villa.

I had always wanted to remake my original map, dod_mansion, but in a more performable format and with my new knowledge of mapping. Villa was the culmination of that desire. I spent about 60 hours on villa, which technically is not a large amount of time for one map. I had intended to do something which had not been done since the early days of Day of Defeat: create a map that, when one team won, would switch the spawns of the teams on the map. This was a VERY complex bit of entity-work. I had to research how the only other DoD map ever to use this style, dod_schwetz, had been created. I even used various command-line programs to tear apart the map file of dod_schwetz, to teach myself how the entity system worked in that map. It took a long time, but I eventually succeeded, and even improved upon the original idea. I figured out a way to set up the map so that when the defending team (the team inside the villa at the start) lost, the attacking team would become the defenders, but if the defending team won, the attackers would remain the attackers. In schwetz, the teams had switched every round, regardless of who won. It took over 200 entities, but dod_villa pretty much became my best piece of work to date. The final version of the map, dod_villa_night, incorporated a nighttime atmosphere, which is rare in DoD, and the spawn-switching, as well as many hidden passages openable only by firing rockets at the walls the hid the entrances.

After completing villa, I wanted to challenge myself and do something I hadn't done before. This led to the creation of dod_mini_town, which is by far my most popular map online, being the only one to really be hosted on multiple servers and played regularly. The reason this map was so unique to me, and such a challenge, was because unlike all my previous maps and maps following this one, I created dod_mini_town completely on-the-fly. I did not draw a map of what I intended it to look like. I did not think about it at all. I simply created as I went, throwing up buildings where I thought I needed them, adding details on a whim. As it turned out, this worked to my advantage, because while dod_mini_town was a small map by any standards (it took me only 20 hours to create), it was very unique in that almost every building was usable, there were many ways to get somewhere from anywhere in the map, and it became hugely popular. It is still played regularly on many servers. Which, of course, makes me feel pretty good about it. :)

About the time I got done with this map, DoD Source had been out for about 2 years. Originally I hated Source, because it was so unlike the original game that I could not appreciate it. But after mini_town was done, I started to really give it a chance and try it as a new game entirely instead of a remake of my favorite game. I eventually learned to appreciate it, and became interested in finally learning to map for Source. Since I had extensive experience mapping for classic, Source's few changes came to me quite easily. I still do not know everything about the entity system in Source, but I have learned to adapt my VERY high skill vertex manipulation to the new form of brushwork in Source, Displacement. At this time, I still plan to make more maps for Classic at some point, because it is my first love, and is still quite popular, but am currently spending my time learning to map for Source, because I can see such potential in the engine to help me create maps I've previously only been able to dream about.

So, that's pretty much it for my mapping history. I thank you for taking the time to read this.

Also, as evidence of the extensive number of maps I have started but not finished, here's a (mostly) complete list of every map file I have ever started. There are some I still may finish at some point.

dod_mansion
dod_mansion2
dod_verdine
dod_errata
dod_jungleassault
dod_junglegym
dod_egypt
dod_yadsendew
dod_castle_vale
dod_ravine
dod_ravine2
dod_castle_vale2
dod_untitled (many of these, actually)
dod_2v2_houses
dod_tprac_1
dod_tprac_2
dod_tprac_3
dod_tprac_4
dod_crux
dod_courtyard
dod_hbms
dod_ghbmsr
dod_kingofhill2
dod_kingofhill3
dod_master
dod_mini_cavern
dod_kingofhill9
dod_newone
dod_themoon
dod_tiny_courtyard
dod_uberlord
dod_wallsiege
dod_drawbridge
dod_blizzard
dod_castles
dod_industrial
dod_keep
dod_mines
happybday (made for my mother's bday..she loved it)
tjt_conflict

Oh, and for the record, every bit of this site was programmed by hand by me. No HTML editors, nothing. I HTMLed this whole site. Yeah, I rock.

If you'd like to view my IT portfolio, click here.