Timebomb Madness

Timebomb Madness is a Roblox build-to-survive game heavily inspired by Creature Chaos, or more specifically, its origin, Creeper Chaos (which got taken down by a DMCA strike by Mojang all the way back in 2019), where you build during day-time to survive a horde of different types of timebombs.

Foreword

This blog will mainly discuss Timebomb Madness' history, as well as how it is currently, and what's to come in the future. Controversies will not be covered.

I'll probably miss/not have enough resources for a lot of stuff about the game. Archiving was something I never really worried about when the game was freshly being worked on. Which means that many things will be written purely out of my own blurry memory.

Prelude

We're gonna have to go all the way back to the start to know why Timebomb Madness was even made.

Creeper Chaos

Creeper Chaos was a game made by RVVZ and is what basically revived the build-to-survive genre. The game was a decent success, and many fans loved it (including me). If this game never existed, Timebomb Madness would not exist today.

There was one crucial thing RVVZ overlooked while making this game. And that was using official minecraft assets (textures iirc?) which Mojang did not like, at all. Overnight, the game was swiftly taken down by a DMCA strike from Mojang. And after that, it was pretty much the end of the road. RVVZ didn't plan on overhauling the game and its assets at that time.

Around a year later (2020-2021?), a remake of the game appeared out of seemingly nowhere. It was a remake of the original Creeper Chaos, by a developer formerly known as rubixxman (now RefusalMan).

Only footage of Rubix's Creeper Chaos I could find

This remake was infamous for not being nearly as high quality as the original, leaving a lot of the fans from the original game deeply disappointed.

One day, Blocco (friend of mine) ranted in Equinox's (also a friend of mine) DMs on discord about how bad rubix's remake was. Equinox suggested that blocco should make his own CC (Creeper Chaos) because it was a fairly big gap in the market at that time.

Blocco agreed and decided to start the project under his already-existing roblox group, The Block Bros. I somehow found out about this 1 or 2 days later (that, or Blocco or Equinox told me) and asked if I could help work on the game.

I vividly remember working on the thumbnail for the remake with blocco, which looked like this:

Creeper Chaos remake by me and blocco, circa September 2022

The development at one point was so slow due to me and blocco constantly fighting over pointless stuff, so blocco asked me to leave. I did, and me, the petty asshole I was back then, drilled into Blocco's brain that "Your game is gonna go to shit without me". (It was quite the opposite, actually).

Ironically, rubix can be seen playing blocco's take on the CC remakes microtrend.

Blocco's Creeper Chaos first ever playtest

DMCA Warfare

Around nearly the same time, RVVZ started work on Creature CHAOS. Pretty much the original game but overhauled by the same creator. The game released 1 month after its creation. (for comparison, Timebomb Madness took ~1 1/2 years to actually release)

Shortly after, RVVZ contacted Rubix about the unlawful use of his intellectual property (whether RVVZ actually contacted rubix about it is merely an assumption). Which honestly to this day, to me at least, sounds like an utter lie and a false claim. A few months after that, Rubix's game was taken down, and that was the end of Rubix's creeper chaos.

Blocco thought he was safe with his solo project. But his CC was annihilated by Mojang as well. It is suspected that rubix was behind it though.

Well Now What

Blocco is not the type to give up when losing a fight that was unfair from the start. He really wanted to bring this game back on its feet so he could add it to his portfolio. But that begs the question; how? How would a CC remake even be possible with RVVZ pretty much owning the copyright for the whole genre? That wasn't important for Blocco yet. He wanted to focus on actually making the game playable first.

I tell blocco in a groupchat that he should ditch creepers and to give the game a different name entirely. This is where the concept of timebombs could be first seen. I also suggested that he renames the game to 'Explosives Havoc'.

The Deleted User is my old account

Birth of Timebomb Madness

Blocco gets bored one day and starts to focus fully on this game. I couldn't keep ignoring the potentional the game was showing so I annoyed him about working on the game again and blocco eventually agreed.

A few weeks later, Vluu joins in out of nowhere, saying he wants to do maps. I never really talked with Vluu much before that point, only having known about his presence in the RAC (Roblox Animator Community). I also participated in the Animator Time Megamix: Remapped animation collab, which Vluu hosted, like way before.

We never considered 'Explosives Havoc' to be the final name. So on a random day, I suggested 'Timebomb Madness'. It sounded much better than the old name so we decided that that would be the actual name of the game, and not another placeholder name like 'EH'.

I started working on the logo, which sucked ass. Fortunately, Blocco was pretty good at graphics designing. I don't know why, but it's been something Blocco's ALWAYS been good at. Evolution of the logo can be seen below.

Evolution of the Timebomb Madness logo

I pretty much kickstarted logo development, and blocco fixed all the issues it had. Blocco also went a little insane and made 2 bonus variations nobody really asked for (blue and simple ver.) but they looked really good regardless. In-game, you'll see the red version when loading in during daytime, the blue version when loading in during nighttime and the simple version when a server is shutting down.

Release Now or Die Trying

Timebomb Madness took so painfully long to release because it suffered from the bystander effect. The game was mostly finished, had all its barebones done, but everyone was just too lazy to finish their stuff.

The development and workflow was so excruciatingly long and painful. Blocco woke up one day saying HELLO WE NEED TO RELEASE THIS therefore making a short release schedule. I was very stubborn and hard to work with by just simply not caring which was not helping at all. But I wasn't the only problem. I kept repeating myself that we barely had content for the release. We really only had the sword and its upgrades as the only weapon, not even the axe was finished, only halfway somewhat. I was pretty conflicted with myself. For blocco it was "release now or wait another year", for me it was "release now, risk getting barely any players due to lack of content, or risk having the game be scrapped because it would take too long". I decided the first option was more worth it.

The block bros discord server used to be called 'vitya's and blocco's spaceship', where vitya (friend of mine) and blocco were the two owners. Albeit the server was mainly focused on blocco's YouTube and his BFC series, which was pretty much like an object show, but in roblox. I don't recommend watching those (blocco definitely agrees with me on this) since the humor is very outdated and stupid. (We were all pretty young at the time).

We figured we'd have to promote it somehow. Blocco's YouTube or him and vitya's discord server weren't big enough to simply announce "Hey guys we made a game check it out :D". The game would've flopped and died a poor shit death. Instead, we settled on making a trailer. Which was probably the best thing we could've done for release. On top of that, the server was rebranded to The Block Bros, and vitya was eventually demoted to admin. The server unfortunately was no longer vitya's and blocco's, now only blocco's. Vitya was completely fine with it though, the server was dead anyways.

I wasn't a pretty big fan of the trailer. We had an insanely talented animator (who carried the whole game in terms of animation), but Vluu was the one that animated the trailer. So I was pretty unamused.

The Timebomb Madness trailer

Regardless, the trailer blew up. 100k views in under a day, users started joining the discord en masse. We did not expect this outcome at all, and it put a lot of pressure on us. Because of that, the release was delayed by a few hours. How I fixed everything and overworked myself to the point I couldn't feel my fingers WITHOUT any caffeine is beyond me. (My chronic caffeine addiction started much later).

The Anomaly

On release, we were all pretty hyped up to try out the game. The game reached around 200? or so ccu. At that time, it was the biggest project I've ever worked on. (Since then I've worked on bigger projects, but this was a huge milestone for me).

But then, at around 3 in the morning while I was playing with everyone, with me and all the other devs in a private vc, I heard words which I thought wouldn't be that big of a deal at first.

"Yo I found a bug"

Well, that was to be expected. It's probably nothing game-breaking or crazy. I mean, we didn't have any QA testers aside from some friends, so bugs were to be expected. What could it possibly be?

Oh. The entire shop system was broken. Well, it's probably an easy fix, right? Although I was quite stressed, with all the players complaining about it at once, I left the game and looked into it in studio. Hmm... It's unpredictable, can't be replicated, and I don't know how to fix it.

Fuck.

If one person bought an item, everyone else would get it. That, or the item would be lost and never given. The toolbar would duplicate some items. Everything came crashing down at once.

The amount of stress this has caused me has definitely done irreversible damage to my brain. I spent hours, constantly debugging it, trial and error, rewriting entire portions of code, praying that I would find a way to fix it. And during that, more bugs were found, which were small, but only amplified the pressure. I was sweating, hyperventilating, I felt sick and needed to puke.

Okay, no, let's not overexaggerate it. I never puked or felt sick. But it was one of the most stressful moments of my life. I did fix it eventually, but it kept me up until like 08:00 AM. I don't remember exactly how I fixed it, but, it was something that shouldn't have fixed it. To this day, I don't know how the bug occured.

A gif Vluu made to cope with our game completely falling apart

Things Change

The game was alright for a few months. But eventually, my immaturity caught up to me. A huge controversy around the game spread like wildfire. I won't go into details as I stated that controversies will not be covered.

I was kicked off the team. Blocco eventually transferred ownership over to Vluu, and the game seemed like it was done for. After the drama settled down, work on the Fight or Flight update began. Blocco, although he left the main server, secretly worked on the update all along. This was pretty much a "Operation: Save the Game" mission. This was when timebomb variants were first introducted.

I saw all of this happening, and I talked shit about the game out of jealousy that I wasn't part of the team anymore. I was seething pretty hard. This was before me and vitya worked on a little side-project called Scary horro game.. We worked on it for about a week, my main motive for working on it was that I didn't have anything else to do since Timebomb Madness was no longer an option. Game took about a week to finish, and, it blew up? Even Jayingee played it.

Now why does Scary horro game matter? Well, before me and vitya worked on it, I changed my name to Zytris to completely forget about what I did and to avoid distractions as I was growing and changing as a person. Scary horro game was pretty therapeutic to work on. No stress by loads of fans, no high expectations, me and vitya worked at our own pace, and we didn't even take it that serious. I don't know if I'd be the same without SHG.

Eventually, I got desperate, and made concept stuff (that might be added in the future at the time of writing this) to show to Vluu in hopes of getting back in the team. One of these concepts was serializing banner data. This is the only concept out of the few that I made that can actually be seen ingame today. Before my serialization, banner data was plain JSON. Now, it's compressed binary, encoded in base64, how awesome is that?

Vluu, naturally, didn't want to just simply rehire me without asking the other developers first. I promised that I changed and that I wouldn't steer an entire community into edginess. Because I was so desperate, and with Vluu forwarding all my messages to the devs to review, they agreed to let me become QA.

Becoming QA was a pretty big deal, because then, I'd have a chance to prove myself. It's very hard to believe that people can change, but I consider myself proof that it is possible. It just takes dedication. Blocco remaking my Timebomb Madness moderation bot did not go very well, he had the genius idea of rewriting it in C?? Although a simple NodeJS server paired with discord.js would've worked just fine. So, I offered to bring the bot back on its feet, nothing more.

It got to a point in bot development where I needed access to admin perms in the developer discord as well as studio access to the game, to make the bot work with bot-to-roblox communication. Essentially, I became a shadow-developer. Until much later, where I was finally given the TM Team role in the discord. Thankfully, the people accepted me, and had hope in me that I did in fact change.

To compensate for all the damage I've caused, it was time to overwork myself and bring me to my absolute limit. I directed the entire Timebomb Madness Hallows update. I worked 24/7 on making this the biggest update ever. I even made what I believe to be one of my best soundtracks.

Where It All Began, probably one of my best soundtracks ever

I will never cook like this again

No, the track isn't halloween themed at all. I still struggle to really theme songs. But it worked out in-game in the end.

I had a pretty big burnout from the whole update, and it was unique from other games' halloween events. But I still felt like I haven't done enough. Up next was the christmas update, which I composed 3 tracks for. My personal favorite being Explosive XMAS. I also pretty much lead the whole update.

Then, we all chilled out for a bit. But I couldn't miss the opportunity to add random shit to the game. April Fools was right around the corner and I had a lot of ideas in mind. It was probably the most fun update to both play and work on. The update lasted around a week or two.

Present

If you've made it this far, you deserve to know the truth. Timebomb Madness isn't being worked on anymore. Expect all future updates (if any) to be plain bug fixes. It's been a good run, but I don't see this game ever reaching more than 300 ccu again. There is simply no hope, and we don't earn nearly enough money for our efforts either. Real-life stuff has also been coming in the way, and me and the other developers are busy with our own projects. We're holding off on announcing this to the entire server in fear of disappointing everyone.

So, what's to come in the future? Well, it should be pretty clear if you read the above.

End

It's funny to think about how this whole game was made out of pure disgust for rubix's remake. No offense to you rubix, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun without competition.

The throne for the build-to-survive genre is for Zombies vs Humans to take.

Edit history

• 2025/05/19 Clarification in DMCA warfare