Freakazoid has written the Map editor which helps to create new Maps fast and easily. He has been in the Development Team nearly from the release of creepsmash.de. For this reason I will ask him some questions and perform a small interview:

Hi Freakazoid, please tell us a little bit about you.

My Name is Thomas Bialik. I am 26 years old and my friends told me that I look like I am 30+ :-( I am IT merchandiser and learned how to write programms during my training. Now I work in booth construction.

Where, how and since when did you noticed creepsmash?

I noticed creepsmash because of a workmate. We had been searching for a tower defense that we can Play against each other.

What do you like about Creepsmash?

I like the artless graphicic style that reminds me of Vector TD.

For which reason did you start developing Creepsmash?

At first I had only posted some suggestions in the forum and because of this Contex forced me to help him with the development ;-) Now, there’s no turning back…:D

How did you get the idea to start writing your Map editor?

Like some other users I would create my own new maps, but the creation of .map-files was very uncomfortable. So I thoughtthat this was the moment to use my C# knowlege to create a mapeditor which will do all the stuff easily and quickly for everybody. I feel the community is very important for these kind of projects and the more everybody in the community can helpthe better it is for the success of the project.

Are you satisfied with the mapeditor or will you add some more features?

I am very satisfied with the mapeditor. My first steps had been only for testing and now there are some ideas to improve it with some new features like creeps that can accelerate or move diagonally through the map.

What is your function in the Creepsmash team?

I am looking for bugs in the client and add new features. My first work was the HP-bar over the creeps.

How much time did you spend in Creepsmash?

A lot of time. Nearly every day and my girlfriend had to suffer with that. I had a timeout to recharge my energy reserve and motivate me to start again with full power. During this time I didn’t work on the code, didn’t play and had less contact with the other team members.

The development of creepsmash goes straight ahead, which features would you want in the following versions?

I think there is less competition ingame. It should be more like Blizzards battle.net, with more cometition and rankings. A seperate look on a different game mode (2 player, 3 player ,4 player). Ingame I would like a very strong creep, that can be the 5th in a row but I will do a posting for this suggestion in time. The creeps in the last row should only be used inbalanced games. Now nearly every game ends with phoenix and raptors. This should be fixed.

Would you tell us some new features in the near feature?

There will be a friend-list someday. I have no more detailed information at this point.

Will be some of te following features added? Teamplayer, Visitor, Turnament?

All these game modes were very complex to integrate into the game because of the game mechanic(client and server) and in the GUI(Graphical User Interface). Both parts of the code are complicated to change, so there will be no fast integration. I have started to write a visitor mode but I stopped the development because of my timeout. After a code rewrite I will restart the integratation of these modes but not in the near future I think.

How important are the communities suggestions to the development team?

The suggestions of the community were very impotant to me, so I tried to add them as fast as possible because without them Creepsmash couldn’t be alive. An actual example was the Multitower selection (viewtopic.php?f=6&=111viewtopic.php?f=6&t=500 ) and the tower strategy “furthest”. This additional strategy will be in one of the next versions of creepsmash.

What features do you miss the most in Creepsmash?

Clan support and chat whispering.

Where do you see creepsmash if you look six months in the future?

I wish for a bug free game with a huge community. The game should have small time gamers and hardcore gamers alike who will battle with each other as if it were life and death.

What problems do you have as a developer?

The code architecture is not upgrade friendly. It is an adventure to find the code cluster that you need because the basic code had some mistakes and bad-defined classes. Additionaly we have problems with the “sendbug” and asynchronous gamplay. I hope the last bugs will be eliminated in the next version.

What is your motivation to improve creepsmash?

The huge growth of the community and the ability to make others happy.

How often do you play creepsmash currently?

I play only play everynow and then.

Did you have fun during playing?

Yeah, but I am not a hardcore gamer. I enjoy the game more if I play a game once in a while.

Do you have a favorite map?

Not really, I haven’t played most of the new maps…

Thank you for your time! Is there anything you would like to say in closing?

I want to say thank you to the CS-Community for their support and the other team members for promoting creepsmash as well as doing some community work. That is equally as important as the code development.