The game that I’ve been working on for the last three years, Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, was both simultaneously announced and launched today. This is the first time in my career that I’ve had a game be publicly revealed on the same day it was released. In old days of game development, you’d release a trailer or screenshots a few months to a year before launch, let the public get hyped, gamers would form inaccurate assumptions and unrealistic expectations, and then your game would be mildly received.
We did it differently this time around. We didn’t let the public speculate and make rumours about the game. We let them know the game exists and they could play it immediately. Of course, the Internet being what it is, it didn’t stop a few people from making inaccurate statements about our game, but that’s gamers for ya.
On a personal note, I feel like I had tremendous amount of professional and technical growth while working on this game. I took on a bit more responsibility and learned a massive amount about how the Frostbite engine works. Specific to this new game, I wrote the conversation system that allows players to speak to NPCs in the game. This conversation system will respond to the player differently, depending on what you’ve done in the game. I also wrote the tools that allowed our writers to craft dialogue for the characters in game. I was also responsible for extending the existing system that determines which players did the best in a multiplayer match and then awards them specific boasts at the end, eg. the player with the most assists, healing, or who played the objective the most. I also did a ton of other smaller things in the game.
I’m very proud of my work on this game and I hope that people will derive great joy from playing it.