Bernard Yee explains the lost taco plot in Plants vs Zombies sequel (interview)

GamesBeat: It raised this suspicion in my mind. Do they want me to spend money on something? The reasoning wasn’t obvious to me.

Yee: I can understand why you’d think that. We want to address both players. If a player wants to spend some money and unlock the worlds, great. From a business perspective, we like that. From a game-maker’s perspective, I never want you to feel bored. I want you to feel like you’re doing something fun. Ultimately those are not in contradiction. If you’re always doing something fun, it doesn’t matter if I’m trying to get you to spend money or not. You’re doing something fun.

I think that’s the difference between us and a lot of other games, where you’re like, “I’m doing something boring. Let me avoid this.” We don’t want to do that.

GamesBeat: I thought it was more fun if I moved on to another world, or if I moved on to another level in that world that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t necessarily think of it as much fun if I was replaying a level with slightly different parameters. But I think that what you’re describing could be a kind of hidden fun in the game.

Yee: You want to build that level of discovery. “Oh, I brought back the cannon to Egypt!” I’m actually not sure if you can do that. It might be blacklisted. But the plant that you can unlock later in the same world is the double sunflower. It’s a side path in Egypt. You bring that back to some of the earlier challenge levels and it changes the way you play the game. “Wait a second. Maybe I want to delay a zombie and do the double sunflower.” For anybody who understands amortization, that’s a good investment. It changes the way you can approach a level. That’s where we want to appeal to more core gamers, the people who want to explore the strategy.

GamesBeat: I dinged you guys for your story. It looked like you came up with the script in about five minutes there.

Yee: [Laughs] It’s no Last of Us, if that’s what you mean.

GamesBeat: Where did that script come from? Is it like, “We want to make the silliest story possible?”

Yee: Crazy Dave is, in fact, crazy. Plants Vs. Zombies is a very punny game. We wanted it to be silly. We wanted it to whimsical. That being said, it inspires the question – if Dave has a time machine, how did zombies get across time? There are things we’d like to explain more in the future, but I will leave that out there. How did zombies get across time? It is silly, and deliberately so, but it’s not completely random.

GamesBeat: How did you guys focus on three worlds and decide that was good to ship, instead of including more worlds?

Yee: One of the things about Plants Vs. Zombies — and Popcap in general, but our game especially – is the level of care that we apply to the game. Each of our worlds is really content-heavy. We look at the quality of the animation, the background paintings, the character designs, the unique effects and unique mechanics in each world. It takes time. I wish I had Crazy Dave’s time machine, because I would have done more.

But there’s only so much you can do in a given period of time. We wanted to deliver the players a good chunk of content, which includes a unique first playable through, and the challenges, and the danger room, which is what we call the challenge zones like Pyramid of Doom and Dead Man’s Booty. Those are the things that we felt like we could deliver. It’s a good chunk of content given how much time it takes to make the stuff and hit a release date.

The short answer is quality before quantity. What we deliver, we want it to be good.

GamesBeat: What’s been some of the reaction and the thinking behind the gesture attacks you could do with your fingers?

Yee: I think people really love it. I was working on a game that never got greenlit over at Bungie, a mobile game, and that was one of the things we enjoyed exploring, this physical feeling. I pinch the zombie and it pops up. You put your finger to the glass and bolt of electricity emits from it and zaps the nearest zombie. That’s important, to take advantage of the platform and the touch screen. From the player’s standpoint, it’s a great bailout. You can earn coins in games at a pretty good clip and use it a couple of times.

All the designers tell me that I should use the pinch, but I still like to use the zap, because I find it really satisfying.

GamesBeat: When you take this into the near future, are you guys going to do more tweaking of those parameters or come up with new game modes? Is that a way you’re going to change the experience going forward?

Yee: There’s adding new content, like new worlds. We’re definitely doing that. I have to say, my favorite world is yet to come. And I think we want to change game modes, give different ways to play the content and experience things again in new ways. Both of those things are going to happen. But the core philosophy behind the game is not going to change.

GamesBeat: What about multiplayer?

Yee: [laughs] I wish I could talk about it. I wish I could comment on that stuff. Plants Vs. Zombies is loved by lots of players. You would think it’s a thing we would think about, how to get people to share that experience more directly.

GamesBeat: Do you have a favorite lineup of plants, or anything players should think about as a tip for how to survive?

Yee: Absolutely. People are going to think I’m shilling, but I believe the best upgrade to purchase is to start with 25 extra sun. It’s like investing in your 401k. You start early and it pays benefits throughout the cycle.

I’m a big fan of a delay plant and the bonk choy, because the bonk choy does two things. A lot of players used to use the strategy, back in Plants Vs. Zombies one, where they’d use a wall-nut to block a whole crowd of zombies, and then they’d put a potato mine behind it. When the wall-nut goes, it takes out all the zombies. I do the same thing with the bonk choy and the wall-nut. The bonk choy is also a dual purpose thing, because it’s also a bailout plant. You can plant it behind the zombies and it’ll buy you some time, and maybe even bail you out of a tough situation.