This article goes over the sort of attitude you should adopt if you want to enjoy mapping and become good at it.

What follows are details of what sort of attitude you should take when you want to create maps. You don’t necessarily have to be a particular type of person to make good maps but when you do make a map adopting the following attitudes help. You may be thee laziest person in the World but if you enjoy making maps you will (eventually) produce great maps.

Don’t Be A Perfectionist
You can’t make a map 100% perfect so don’t even try to. You simply cannot make a map that looks an exact way and is built in a particular manner. Not every texture needs to be aligned in an absolutely realistic way, not every object has to be really detailed (see below about having an eye for detail).

Be Artistic
By artistic I don’t mean you need to know the virtues of different types of paper (school flashback…) but it does help to have some idea of what looks good and what goes well together. You should be happy to spend some time playing around with textures, lighting etc to get the best looks.

Have An Eye For Detail
Knowing when and where to add detail or tweak the map is important. If you don’t get it right you can end up spending more time than necessary working on your map (cause frustration on your part) or not working enough on it and having a map that looks bland.

Don’t Overdo The Competitiveness
A bit of friendly competition between mappers is good (it did wonders for the quality of my maps after I entered a mapping competition with my Russia map) but don’t take it too far. Trying to be the best mapper out there or trying to create world conquering maps will cripple the enjoyment you get. Speaking of enjoyment…

Have Fun
If you don’t enjoy making a map then you are wasting your time. More so with level design than anything else, if you enjoy what you are doing it will show, and if you are not enjoying it you will struggle to finish it. If you start a map and you are not enjoying making it then don’t expect things to change further down the line. Stop and determine where it’s going wrong otherwise it will only cause frustration.

Be Imaginative
People don’t want to see the same thing all the time. Making maps that repeat what’s been done before will only get you so far. Not only do companies want to see imagination, it is more fun for you trying out these new ideas and settings. Imaginative maps are also more memorable to the people who play it.

Willingness To Hear Feedback
You don’t want to get all defensive and touchy if people criticize your map. Level design is not an exact science so feedback is very important and you should be happy to receive it. Of course if someone is just harshly abusing your map then that’s unfair and doesn’t help one bit (but you are better off just ignoring it as there will always be people like that).

Willingness To Put In The Effort
You might only spend an hour a week and take a year to finish off a map but if you put the effort into every element of the map, the end result will be so much better. In fact you need to put effort in to make your maps at least half way decent. It takes effort to get the lighting right, it takes effort to make the textures suitably aligned, etc, etc…