The secret to the success of Plants vs Zombies

I believe everyone is very familiar with the game of plant vs zombies, no matter whether have played, can not deny that this game is very popular in Asia. I would like to tell you that I created the "Plant vs Zombies" excellent game, but unfortunately, I am not even a member of the creative team. We are in Shanghai studio based on PvZ to create a new game to learn a lot of PvZ creative experience. Here I will share some of the experience, I hope to help.

For those who have not played, PvZ is a very special game, your house is attacked by zombies, and the only way to resist is to plant some strange plants to help you eliminate zombies. Part of the reason for the game's success is a peculiar sense of humour--an interesting and even funny game.

So who is the main mastermind behind PvZ? The--george Fan, the leftmost in Figure 1, designed the game and was deeply involved in all aspects of the game, driving the game's success. But it is also noted that this is a very small team of four--george, Tod, Rich, Laura, where Laura is responsible for game design.

Tip one: Get inspiration from other games, but innovate. The best game works can be modeled as objects, so that we first reach a similar level, and then build their own characteristics, and then create a successful game from my style. Let's see what games PvZ borrowed.

The first idea of the game came from George's obsession with the tower in World of Warcraft 2. He felt the inside of the "tower" looks like a big plant, so there is a plant for the protagonist of the Tower defense game design ideas.

The second inspiration comes from another popular game "desktop Tower Defense", just a very simplified, no need to scroll the screen of the Tower defense game. George learned to make PvZ easy for everyone.

The third inspiration comes from an old game of the 1983--tapper, I remember the time when I was a kid playing this game in the arcade, in which you need to provide beer for the characters on multiple conveyor belts. George's inspiration was to replace a route with "multiple lines of activity". This is the first time in the Tower defense game. When you put these three ideas together, you can vaguely see the inspiration behind PvZ, but wait, this is not finished.

Fig. 2 Tower Defense mode in World of Warcraft 2 when George was a child, he liked the Disney Company's 1960 film "Swiss Accessibility Robinson" ("The Swiss Family Robinson", also translated "Cape Paradise"). The movie tells the story of a Swiss family who was stranded on an island in a shipwreck and attacked by pirates. The climax of the story is that when a large group of pirates came to the island, the Swiss family used a series of ingenious traps and equipment to counter the pirates, he was used to impress the props.

For example, algae mimics the trap bridge in the play, and the rope trap evolves into a game of zombies that fall from the sky, and the archetype of the human flower is the tiger in the trap.

Another source of inspiration is George's own game Insaniquarium (Strange Aquarium). In fact, George created the game as a student, he used the game to participate in a competition, PopCap founder in IGF (independent game day) to see the game after the PopCap to release, the results in two years after the official release of the PC version, Aquarium games are now popular on many social networks.

Some of the factors that make Insaniquarium popular are the cute aquarium pets, who have different abilities. So this is PvZ's real inspiration core-creating things that have different abilities. In fact, if you look carefully at PvZ's botanical illustrations, you can see how similar they are at the core.

Tip Two: Put ideas into the image prototype as soon as possible. This is an important lesson that we have learned from PvZ's creative process. When you know what kind of game you want, be quick to draw it, start the game as quickly as possible, and see which part feels right. Otherwise you'll be frustrated when you waste a lot of energy and find it's not fun.

At that time we plotted the game prototype, the effect is not mentioned, but we have to use the prototype as much as possible.

In the game, when the creature from the aquarium is going to attack your farm, you need to grow the cabbage cannon to defend it. So you click on the top left corner of the screen to get the plant seeds. To make these plants fruitful, you first need to water the land to make it into a meadow, then you need to plant seeds on the grass, then you need to water the plant seeds, and then after the plants mature can be picked ...

Does that make you feel interesting?

Of course not, and you will soon game over, in fact, there are only two separate links that you would find interesting-planting and tending plants, not fighting in the middle. To solve a monster, you just have to plant it in the right place without waiting for it to grow.

When designing PvZ, George often plays "Magic" chess game with his friends, the game is to collect different cards and put them in front of the table, and then draw out cards against other players.

But the problem with this idea is that sometimes you also need to look after the sunflower and the vegetable shooter, the inability to juggle is often frustrating and the game quickly ends. So sometimes it may seem like a good idea, but in practice it is the opposite. The only way to identify is to actually play, which is the importance of building prototypes quickly.

Tip Three: Focus on the game fun. You need to be completely honest with the fun and uninteresting elements of the game to make you feel, and then delete the ingredients that make you feel boring.

Tip Four: Don't be afraid to innovate. Be willing to try and take the consequences of taking risks for innovation. It is recommended that you make a product concept map first. From Figure 4 we can see how pvz evolved, and we saw the concepts of cards, plants, and channels in the game, but then George designed the attackers as ordinary monsters or aliens. Later, many other companies introduced the corresponding farm or garden games, are using plant and insect elements, so George worried that people will think he is copying these games, feel the need to make his game very different, and finally thought of the idea of using zombies, the fact that zombies are one of the elements of our success.

Tip five: Don't put too much effort into naming. It takes a lot of time and effort to find a unique name that can refine and summarize the characteristics of the game. Do not let the name hinder the game progress, this lesson is very important.

Very interesting, the first name of the game is "Plants vs. Zombies", but everyone used it as a project name, never thought it would become the ultimate game name.

In fact, the game's official name for a long time is "Lawn of the Dead", a very ingenious and distinctive name, referenced from a famous zombie movie "Dawn of the Dead".

Unfortunately, we cannot use this name directly because we will be prosecuted. So we contacted the legal owner of the name, the producer of the film, but without authorization, we had to give up and start looking again.

After a while, the title of the game was "Zom Botany", but was forced to give up for legal reasons. We have also tried "Bloom and Doom". So we are a little crazy, has conceived more than 100 names, but because of this or that reason can not choose.

In the end, we felt exhausted. So back to the original name "Plants vs. Zombies", and then everyone knew that the name was officially released, and now almost everyone is talking about it. It's hard to imagine that we've been trying to use other names.

Tip Six: Pull the whole team into the creative group. Creative contributions must have the input of front-line staff, do not regard your team as robots-just tell them to do what they need to do. Encourage them to join the creative process because you don't know where the best ideas come from. George is clearly the leader of the team and is responsible for the big decisions. But his team members are well into creative work, including engineers.

Let's talk about the team. Obviously, a good team is very important. Especially game designers, because you need to set the entire game's picture style. I know that for many designers, there is a view that design is changing and that designers should adapt to any style. But basically, this idea is wrong, every art designer has its own style, when you choose a designer, you choose a certain style. PvZ's first conceptual design came from George, but after a continuous trial of four designers, he finally set the whole design style of the game, including the image of the sunflower and zombie in the game changed several times.

Tip Seven: Early testing, regular testing, and encouraging feedback. Within the PopCap, testing is important not only to test many times earlier, but to invite real customers to participate.

We have a special tool called "Burrito", at different stages of the game, we release each version of the product here and encourage people from all over the company to provide feedback. In the case of PVZ, we receive an important potential problem. There is a person said his wife in the game, do not know should first plant a large number of sunflower, she always only planted a pea shooter on the game over. So she was very frustrated. We have also received a number of questions from more users, with the "Add a game guide" the most.

Tip Eight: Game design to prevent users from making bad choices. Don't let the user think about how to choose or make senior players feel too easy.

At the beginning of the game, the pea shooter needs 100 suns, Sunflower also needs 100 suns, the novice game is likely to mistakenly choose the pea shooter, then we will be the Sunflower Sun points to 50 suns, and the pea shooter to keep 100. So the rookie's wrong choice will become less. This way you can solve novice problems with simple game settings instead of adding hints.

Another example is the card. There are many plant cards on the left side of the game for users to choose, many times the novice indiscriminately will not need to plant the plants down, resulting in the consumption of gold coins too fast, resulting in the game premature end. So we changed the game settings, the first plant card is not selected, only enough gold coins, the card will become bright optional.

Tip Nine: The most important factor that determines the fun of the game--balance. Don't judge for yourself. In our process, the final release of the game, will be invited hundreds of users for months of beta, and collect user data for analysis to understand the difficulty of each checkpoint. If a number of checkpoints for most users of the time is too long, we will be appropriate to reduce the difficulty, to ensure that the level of difficulty and the user needs time is a corresponding ladder-like. At the same time, through data analysis, we can also determine what users like to use the most plants.

Tip Ten: Devote time to continuously polish the product. The product needs continuous operation and improvement, which refers to the analysis of user data, which is the basis of product improvement.

Tip 11: Enjoy the fun. As the creator of the game, if they do not know how to enjoy the fun, how to make users happy through the works? We have designed an April Fool's Day prank, added a false ice and snow barrier in the game. After the user installs, will discover in this one Sekiri, the zombie is frozen, the user can only listen to the north wind whistling voice for a long time. As a result, many players say they are cool, and they even offer a lot of ideas for the game. These ideas eventually contributed to PvZ's new role-Savage zombies.

Tip 12: Extend as much as possible to other terminals and carefully fit them. PvZ now supports the iphone, IPad, Android (Phones & tablets), Windows Mobile 7, Bada, Xbox (XBLA), PS3 (PSN) and many other mainstream platforms. As you can see from Figure 5, the difference between the PC version and the iphone version is that we've turned the zombie's head up by 10%. The buttons are also larger, and the UI interface and menus change accordingly.