2008

2008. The year I started mapping.
This is how I imagine a Valley map would be like if made by 2008 me.

Things I wasn't afraid to use in 2008:
- Long straights
- Badly calculated corners
- A lack of "flow" - actually... I never even heard of flow yet
- A lot of scenery, but not optimized for guiding the driver
- Unnatural terraforming
- A lot of loops
- No loopcams - sorry, I didn't learn how to make those yet
- Turbos - lots of turbos! I called them "boosters"
- Roulette turbos - I called them "variable speed boosters"
- Reverse turbos - I called them... well you get the picture
- Unsmooth jumps
- Freewheeling
- Long tracks that weren't good for online (3+ minutes)
- Bad author times - let's just finish the track once and call it good enough

What I cared about in 2008:
- Respawnable checkpoints! It was one of the exciting things about getting United, after struggling through TMN ESWC tracks where respawning was not part of the game.
- Trying out how all the blocks worked together
- Making tracks that spelled words or looked like faces from above
- Rendering videos of tracks. I had a bad graphics card with a memory issue that would cause the geometry of blocks to fly all over the map. It made it very difficult to play. But when I would render a video, I could see what the game was actually supposed to look like. If it wasn't for the video render feature in MediaTracker, I probably would have quit TM quite early on. But I held out until I was able to get a new graphics card, sometime in 2008.
- Fullspeed red booster Island tracks
- Demostyle Island tracks
- Discovering new tracks on TMX and learning how far people could push this game
- Discovering and falling in love with league tech tracks when I ran across maps from UL5 and SL6. Though it would be years before I started building my own tech tracks.
- Learning how far to push the Desert car before it tipped over
- Learning how far to push the Coast car before it slid out
- Getting yelled at by a user on TMX for not thanking people individually for their awards, and then feeling really bad about it and vowing to do better
- Making multiple versions of the same track and releasing them as different tracks

Well, that's all I can think of for now. It was a different time. And this is just me reminiscing a little.

This map is not my usual/current style.
For that, feel free to check out a track like Exclamation Park: