The minigames contain so many ideas – are they prototypes you threw out from the main game?
The focus in the beginning and for at least the first year of development was on Adventure mode, but Tod [Semple]’s a really fast programmer and so he was done with his stuff once we had the game mostly nailed down and was looking for something to do. He suggested working on minigame ideas.

The quality of each one is surprisingly high, considering you have 20 of them.
Yeah, I think it’s a result of continuously iterating. The entire Puzzle mode came out of those experiments too. Vasebreaker and I, Zombie were single-level minigames, and when I was tweaking them I found myself getting addicted to both. It was cool how these new game modes came out of just re-envisioning the same rules – we used the same zombies and the same plants, but there were so many different interactions between them.


^{The I, Zombie minigame, in which you play on the side of the zombies}

They feel very much a part of the game, so much so that you can use them to learn new tactics for Adventure mode. Was that part of the plan?
I don’t think I ever consciously decided that. I think I was just looking to create new game experiences for the player and it was a nice side-effect. But, yes, you play I, Zombie from the side of the zombies and you learn so much more about the interactions between them. If you build the game the right way, cool stuff like that will happen. We wanted to make sure that all the plants had character and had different uses and that all the zombies weren’t just stronger versions of earlier ones. We tried to come up with interesting things for them to do and interesting ways to combat them.

Many PopCap games are careful not to distract players from the main game. Was it a risk to do that with the minigames in Plants Vs Zombies?
Yeah, I was actually pretty conscious of that while we were putting this together. During development I had it so that players couldn’t check out any of the other modes until they completely finished adventure mode because I didn’t want them to get sidetracked, or go to a mini-game they maybe didn’t like and get derailed so they wouldn’t want to finish the game. But then some beta testers’ feedback indicated that they wanted to see some of the mini-games open up beforehand.

Because they enjoyed the variety?
Exactly, so I decided to try that out and it stuck. The first three mini-games open up in the middle of the adventure and I think that works pretty well. It’s just a little taste - I hope that they’re all interesting and they don’t cause the player to stop playing the adventure.

The minigames here really develop the core themes, too, and a lot are great games in their own right.
I think the challenge for this game will be communicating to the audience that. I think the general gaming public expects in a lot of cases that adventure mode that will be ninety per cent of what there is to do and everything after that will be repetitive and slight gameplay changes from the original theme. This is definitely the first game I’ve worked on that really has a ton of variety after you finish adventure or after you finish the main game mode and I’m hoping that people stick with it and see all the things that are going on after adventure mode too.

Who were you designing the game for? The Bejeweled market? Or is it a gamer’s game?
I just designed it as something that I would want to play. I like games that are easy to get into – I don’t like reading a whole bunch of tutorial text so I try to let the player learn by playing the game. I’m hopeful that it will cross over to both the Bejeweled audience and hardcore gamers.

So there wasn’t a mandate from PopCap that it should be suitable for everyone?
No. I think there might have been an unspoken one, but it was never directly given to me, and, yeah, I guess I never strayed from that.


^{Some of Rich Werner's early zombie designs}

The graphic style and animation is beautiful, and distinctive. How did it come about?
Actually every game I made so far I started off with only me doing the prototyping, and I used to draw a lot before I started making games, so I do these really kind of non-slick looking drawings, like pixel art. The zombies and the first few plants you see today actually resemble in a lot of ways the ones that I did initially. And then we were looking for an artist for this project and Rich [Werner] came along and he just totally got the style. A good part of why the game looks so cool is also down to the animation scheme. Our programmer, Tod, came up with a way in which you can animate something in Flash and export it out. I was a little concerned because I didn’t want it to look too like something cut out of paper like South Park, but we tried it out, and because of Todd’s awesome engine and Rich’s awesome animation skill it really worked.

Were there any zombies and plants that didn’t make the cut?
Yeah, quite a few. We had a zombie walking a zombie dog at one point. Your shots would go over the dog, and when you killed the zombie the dog would freak out and charge. But it didn’t change the gameplay enough and I felt like people wouldn’t get it. As for plants, we were experimenting with having this whole class of plants that float, so like a walnut that floats above your plant so you can protect it from a bungee zombie or a catapult. But it was hard to visually work out their positions.

We can’t get past level 24 on Endless mode. Those red-eyed gargantaurs are sadistic.
We had to make Endless harder – people were playing it up to level 100 in a three-hour sitting. We were shooting for really good players to stop after level 30, so that’s why [gargantaurs] turn up.

This is an extended version of an interview featured in E202.