PopCap on Plants vs. Zombies Growing Out to Other Platforms

July 11th, 2009, 22:39 Posted By: wraggster

Collect sunshine, plant your garden, and butcher the waves of undead threatening to break into your house. That's the premise of PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, the curiously addicting take on tower defense from the makers of Peggle, a title first released for PCs and later for Xbox Live Arcade, iPhone, and Nintendo DS. Currently Plants vs. Zombies is only available for PC and Mac, but sometime soon we should be hearing something about where it might take root next.

"Sometime within the next two to three months I think you can expect us to announce at least one new platform on which Plants vs. Zombies would be arriving fairly imminently," said PopCap's Garth Chouteau.

But what exactly was meant by imminently? "We take a whole lot longer with these things than anybody else, and that's not going to change. We could have had Peggle on XBLA in half the time it took us, but it wouldn't have been as good as it is. To say that if we make an announcement two to three months from now the game's going to show up three weeks later on the platform we announced, that's probably very optimistic. Within a month or two, yeah, that's probably not unrealistic."

As of right now, there have been no official platform confirmations. Chouteau was willing to comment on the issue of transitioning the frantic clicking required for success in the PC version to platforms where the control inputs differ. "There may be some sort of workaround required where the exact game controls or the activity that you perform on the screen is slightly modified. Maybe you're able to designate in advance where you're going to put the next five plants when the necessary sun or resources are available and when those plants are available to you to purchase, or something like that…It's what we grapple with when we adapt these game."

"I think the iPhone is a little less of an issue, perhaps, than typical console controllers…The kinds of rapid clicking we're talking about in Plants vs. Zombies involves clicking in one place and then clicking somewhere else on the screen that can be quite far away. I think with the iPhone the ability to do that with your finger potentially overcomes that…With a game controller, you grab the plant and then you're dragging it down the screen to plant it in a particular space and that can take some time. And Plants vs. Zombies, particularly in the later stages, can get pretty frantic, and that could be frustrating…If it was going to make the game any less fun, we just wouldn't do it."

Chouteau also mentioned one platform that likely wouldn't work out for the title was any mobile phone with a small screen. "Some of our games like a Peggle or a Bejeweled Twist work great on a postage stamp sized screen. Plants Vs. Zombies, probably not."

http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/100/1002913p1.html

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here