Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville has been out for about a week now and I’ve been reading a lot of feedback online about the game. Anytime you read something on the Internet about some you made is probably inviting pain to visit you but I can’t help it.
The good news is that everything I worked on has been either praised or not mentioned at all (which is sometimes as good as praise since it means it’s not broken). I spent a significant amount of development time helping the single-player or PvE areas and so far, the response to that from players has been almost universally positive. In the multiplayer areas of the game, I worked on the end-of-round logic, which decides who were the best players after the round, and who did the best on each team. The funny thing is, there’s actually a pretty serious bug with some of that logic and it won’t get fixed until next month but it doesn’t seem like anyone has noticed it or complained about it.
Most of the criticism about our game is in areas that I don’t work in, mostly to do with character balancing (some characters are perceived to be too powerful or not powerful enough). That’s a tall order for our designers to get perfect right out of the gate but they’ve been busy trying to improve things.
Overall, I’m super pleased about the reception to our game. I’ve had some bad games come out, which people hated, so I’m relieved to have a good one for once.