The Art of Reanimating Plants vs. Zombies 2

[Music] they're giving me the thumbs up that means it's go time hey everybody thank you so much for coming to the art of reanimating plants for zombies - I know there's a happy hour and a bunch of parties going on right now so just to see even one person especially these guys up here there's a pop cap party so my whole team isn't here except for these two so the art of reanimating plants for zombies - first thing you got to know who's the guy talking to you I'm mark Barrett I'm a lead artist on plants for zombies - I'm an amateur power pointer I'm a private dancer a dancer for hire and if you want to get a hold of me you should take a picture or write this stuff down really really quick or you can come talk to me after this is the art team of plants vs. zombies - they are good folks but they are not to be trusted especially with Photoshop they told me I took this picture and

they said don't worry we'll put you in there and they did so what do I mean by the art of reanimating I was trying to make a pun but it's not great a zombie pun the art of reanimating is a behind the scenes look at the art of plans for zombies - and how we made the old new again [Music] so to do that we have to talk about what is plants vs. zombies the basics are it's a casual tower defense style game that zombies move right to left across the screen and lanes to get to your house and eat your brains you stop that from happening by collecting Sun planting plants and placing them strategically on the board to stop the zombie horde didn't mean to rhyme that the game is set on and around your house in the suburb eeeh with the help of your crazy neighbor Dave you can discover the

source of the zombie scourge and hopefully stop it once and for all unless that game turns out to be a hit in which case it was always a planned trilogy Piz was a hit they did not expect that and I can brag on it because I had very little to do with it now that one over 30 Game of the Year awards I got a 90% it still has a 90% Metacritic and it's loved by millions of people including me the plans for zombies is the reason why I work at PopCap it's the reason I wanted to work at PopCap and as you know when a game does really really well this happens yeah that would be great but right away there was a bit of a problem a big problem the original creative team behind plants vs. zombies had already worked on the game for more

than half a decade and they wanted to move on and do something new and thus began amateur hour I was a new hire and we had a very small very new team we were assembled and given mission papers make a great sequel or die trying we were tasked to make a 5 year old game feel new again and we had no idea how that was done so we went to the shrine of Miyamoto and we prayed Nintendo makes it look so flippin easy but the truth is reinventing a classic is a high-wire act if you don't change it enough then it's boring and it's not original change it just a little but mess with the wrong element in the design and it can make people really uncomfortable and if you change too much you're not a plumber it was our mission not to let this happen to pvz we committed ourselves to make a sequel that both honored the original

and improved as much as possible without becoming creepy porn stars so if standing here today if I could go back in time and have myself a map I the map would say if you the map on how to maybe fled for a zombies - it would say four things it would say make new plants new zombies new environments easy that's obvious add plant food to give every plant a temporary boost allowing users a chance to discover new abilities hidden away in plants both old and new and it's ridiculously fun I would say travel through time and explore an ever-expanding universe and I'd say designed everything to be optimized for mobile and handheld and voila PvZ 2 is so obvious but the truth is at first we had no idea what the hell we were doing and so we turned to what seemed at the

time to be the most obvious choice a farm because hey plants grow on a farm farmville was exceptionally hot at the time and the idea of doing seasons sounded amazing we thought you could have a barn and instead of lawnmowers you could have animals like a goat and a cow because they chew grass like corn or does and it can attack the zombies or maybe the zombies kidnap the animals and you rescue the animals from zombies after all animals have brains - the chickens would have little tiny peanut brains for zombies to snack on but we didn't really want to call the game plants and animals versus zombies and that did not stop us from designing zombie tractors because at that period every idea was awesome it sounded great so we got down to business and started drawing up farm zombies we always start with a rough sketch exploration and I was really inspired by

the art from that Tim Burton movie corpse bride the drew on the back of cereal boxes so I do these I scanned in a cereal box and drew on the back of it in Photoshop very nerdy we choose the best one of these rough designs and then we do a full-color sketch of the ideas that we see have promised and this guy on the Left he can throw a plant around anywhere on the board and the guy on the right he puts that scarecrow down when he is defeated and that acts as a shield for the plants coming up behind her for the zombies coming up behind him so you can see we got pretty far along with these guys our first problem with the farm setting seems really obvious now almost so obvious that I'm actually embarrassed but it turns out people generally have a pretty limited number of images in their head when they think of farm and when you're designing a

zombie the most important thing you want to give the player is a visual sign as to what each zombie will do some of those metaphors like pitchfork and scarecrow work awesome but sometimes the most obvious visual metaphor was not necessarily very far me so it was a bit of a battle between mechanics and appearance and another problem you can see in these early zombie drawings is that I've already crossed the line as far as retaining the spirit of the original game ask a stranger on the street what the character on the left is from and they would say plants were zombies they've seen it they know it they probably love it but ask them what game the guy on the right is from they would have no idea it's a completely different zombie and trying to make something new and maybe bringing a little vanity to the table I changed everything and I'm changing everything I made it unrecognizable the style and the zombies were not our only difficulty on a farm you have a house or a barn but

anywhere else and you don't have a dwelling for the players brains to hide inside and on a farm there's a lot of open field you can see three of my four concepts are in an open field and if a zombie gets from the right side of an open field to the left side of an open field there's not a lot of drama so you can see there's a lot of cool ideas but we would have to go back to a farm house again and that seemed too much like the original and we didn't want to make plans for zombies 1.5 we wanted to make the tube really the only thing that was working for us on the farm is the thing that gave us the idea of a farm and that was the plants we found the plants though to work just about anywhere these are my very first drawings on plants vs. zombies 2 . they said hey why don't you draw some plants we'll see maybe there's a project if it works for you so I went all out and these were a lot of fun to draw but they are not quite pvz so I went

back to the original lineup and if basic zombie is the baseline of plants vs. zombies then these three plants are the melody and if we mess these up then it wouldn't matter if we got everything else right so they were really a great place to start when learning how and where to bring the two in creating new versions of an old character actually is useful to intentionally break it sometimes it can help you discover what the core elements are and once you find the limits on that character you can really hone in on areas you might be able to make it better so for PvZ 2 we knew we were moving to mobile and we decided to switch from an illustrative style of the original to much more graphic easier to read at a small size vector asset created in flash and the original kind of outlined illustrative I mean hand-drawn and Photoshop varying line thickness it has

lots of small nuance details and it's not optimal for animation it's designed to be an illustration and a graphic style we work in flash the lines in flash or math based so they're consistent we colored those lines we kept clean stem shapes and made them more efficient for animation and this outlined some of the major stylistic differences and that was led mostly by what looks great on a small screen there is the same slide I think just with a couple more words so that in mind I kept the changes minor but still meaningful and redesigning sunflower one thing I wanted to do was brighten her up make her silhouette look more like a Sun and I knew that she was going to be happy and I refer to her as a she she could be whatever you want but I wanted her to have little petal arms

that she could wiggle whenever she made a song for the player so that's what that's all about here's the same progression with peashooter and another thing that we did that really helps with appeal I kind of learned from Pixar is you just pump the characters full of air like a balloon to make them rounder and more dimensional and that's useful for animation as well as creating physical merchandise later down the line like toys etc and for the walnut I was absolutely determined to make it look less like a potato everyone caused the original walnut potato I failed though because it still happens some people said the the chubby wrinkles on the one I'm second to the left made him look soft when he's supposed to look hard like a nut and other people said he looked too much like a scrotum and after that I really admired so much if they called him potato since the plants were the only thing that we're really working on the farm and we knew

they could work basically anywhere we decided to throw him in a suitcase and head out on a road trip with crazy Dave is our whacked-out navigator we hopped in an RV and hit the road across the United States no the world this idea was great but really short-lived we did a few explorations football stadiums Paris Egypt but Egypt is where we stopped with that one because Egypt is where we really got somewhere you see that on the right that is more than blatant copyright infringement that my friends is a sweet beautiful interdimensional time warp and that turned out to be the perfect theme for plants vs. zombies - I submit to you if you can choose any theme for your game that time travel is the most excellent theme like you came a little later yes time travel was perfect

because each new time period allowed us to put a fresh coat of paint on all of the original mechanics for example the game board has three basic elements all on the Left grid in the middle a placers Ombuds to come from on the right we match those elements improve them meaningfully here the only real changes are muting the background color so the characters pop off a little more and give ourselves more space for user interface little shout-out to George Daniel rich Werner down there in the corner the original designer an artist anyway after you re-establish that feeling of familiarity of being home with the player then you can do anything you can theme it you can create totally new mechanics totally new experiences and for us as I said the theme of time travel worked remarkably well

in updating the classic basic zombie we gave it a larger head that's easier to see on smaller devices and simpler feet to animate and that's it less is sometimes way way way more if you ask somebody what that character on the right is they'll say plans for zombies I don't know if they would even be able to tell you if it was one or two I hope they would notice - I worked really hard - so before with the farm and with the road trip even we were trying to reinvent everything and we thought that that was how you made it new we replaced one thing with another so we've replaced the comb with a boot replaced the bucket with a slightly crappier bucket it was wrong we came to not only understand but embrace that the original already established a strong

visual language the players understood and responded positively - and if you have that if you're lucky enough to get that in a game that's what makes it a hit don't replace it for us we found you can theme it basic zombie themed there's a new one up here by the way coming very soon same head same pose always wears a tie around his neck but theming the basic zombie through the different time periods makes each one new and exciting for the player and from a development standpoint it's awesome because it's just a reskin for us but it adds to our entire cast of our game it makes it a much richer experience and it feels like a - it gave us so many takes on gave us so many new takes on old characters that it earned us the right and the room to create a bunch of new ones and I think that we

were successful I think we have made and are continuing to make it really fun really amazing and hopefully worthy sequel that was our job when we started out we I wanted I brought two pvz to fit with the plants that were already there and I quiver a little bit to say that it was really an amazing experience so the key takeaways I have a kid to the artist in this room you inherit a mega-hit game you're asked to make the art for a sequel for I know that's a very specific audience key takeaways figure out the core elements of your game and do not replace them find ways to optimize for the platforms you're working on that will lead you to meaningful improvements choose the right theme for your needs not the theme that sounds most obvious don't get attached

right away and once the player feels that sense of home only then can you add the new stuff I know what you're thinking that was very short talk because it's awesome I just gave my first GDC talk and I hope you enjoyed it but there's some bonus materials I just wanted to really quickly thank my team for their hard work and their friendship there are amazing people I wanted to thank the original PVC team for creating a dream game to work on a pop cap for trusting me with the opportunity to make this equal so I'll show you some bonus materials because I think it's awesome I'm an artist this is what I love to see from other artists and then hopefully we'll have a little bit of time for questions so these were just some early sketches this is just a smorgasbord of stuff guys but this is an environment

exploration these were some of Audis very first sketches on how we would travel around in time and that brought about the very very crazy idea of an RV that travels through time a lot of this dev goes into those in background environments they have about 16 different kinds of perspective going on at once and it is very very difficult to me those look believable so I wanted to show just a little bit of his work and then then I kind of want to take you guys through the basic design process of a zombie and the basic design process of a plant how we do that at least how we did it on this game so we start with a design idea like every zombie should represent hopefully just a single mechanic and every plant should represent a corresponding opposite mechanic and those two complement each other so this was some of the early

sketches for parrot or captain zombie and you can see real quickly he just has a bird on his shoulder that he shields and that flies off and steals your plants and it's incredibly annoying and I actually did the voice acting for that bird this is our first sketch of it that is a heinous bird it has crapped all over his shoulder it's not a great silhouette and also this doesn't look very plants for zombies to so polish him up a little bit get them vectorized as you can see this is more illustrative more graphic and then should we go so many animation these are all loops we put little action tags in flash they call this out and the programmer just calls that action out

when it's needed before the zombie now this is a plant that actually didn't end up in our game but did end up in PVC adventures and it's one of the first new plants we ever drew and the idea for him was a short-range attack that was extremely powerful I had to cool down afterwards and he kind of ended up turning into bonk choy but originally he was a beet and so you have that mechanic then you have to skin that mechanic and and whatever way looks the best honestly that still matches the PBV theme and you can see in this little roundup of sketches we have some early peashooter sunflower walnut and zombie down there but that one in the middle was picked most people agreed that looks like a plant that belongs in our universe and it looks like he could do that kind of attack so we do a full-color illustration vectorized that

and animate it and we changed him instead of smacking his head around we decided he would do an uppercut knock the enemy off the screen and then take a little while to cool down and then come back to life and yeah there he is he made it after all I I was really happy to see that all right that is my talk we probably have a lot of time for questions I talked a little bit fast so shoot ahead until they give me the warning an afternoon thank you thank you very much by the way I can't see any of you so ya guys well let me stop you they told me to specifically ask people to go to the microphone so that people listening in the vault could hear this question later

got you okay great presentation thank you very much did you have to do any negotiations with development on how to optimize you know how just to make all of these cool you know ambience animations or reactions work did you ever have to like you know call some of that and dial it down a notch yeah yeah quite a bit actually um you know in our game there gets a point where a crazy amount is going on at screen so the interesting part is it's not for memory reasons that we would have to sometimes take our special effects in particular way back it was just to keep the game from feeling too chaotic to the player in that end game scenario when you have as many plants as you can get on the board and there's as many zombies as possible coming at them

if and that's one reason why a very simplistic graphic style works so well for this game is the more detail and the more animation you add to it the more that visual noise can start become too much for the player and so we did have a few things it's like alright that looks really cool by itself but once you see that done by 30 plants at the same time that it won't work yeah good question if you've conquered time travel what do you do for a third you tell me because I really want to know well here's that so I mean we're making the cool thing about a games is the service and time travel which I submit is the most excellent theme is there are so many places we can still go I'd make the game brand new at each one of those turns

yeah but note that it thought is in the back of my head and it's a question I'm trying to answer but I don't have an answer for you right now next is future though the future is where we're going next is that it if you guys are hungry I'm hungry too all right well we'll call it good thank you very much [Applause]