User blog:Drek'TharSuperSword/Some interesting things and facts about "the making of PvZ" presentation

This was actually part of a test page but whatever. I'll leave it here. These are some interesting discoveries (or maybe not?) that I've found in "The Making of PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies" presentation hosted on Slideshare

• It appears that the sprites for the final version of the plants, zombies and areas can be traced all the way back to version 0.92 released in Halloween 2007 (10 years ago, 1.5 years prior to the game's release). This is proven by looking at slide 61 and 65.
  

  Screenshot for version 0.92. Note the early lawnmower sprite.
  • The lawn mower, however, was changed in version 0.93, as the screenshot for the Ice Level at slide 72 shows the final lawn mower sprite.
• Some of the ideas for the scrapped Ice Level have made its way to PvZ2 (Zombie Yeti throwing snowballs, Hunter Zombie anyone?)
  

  The build notes taken from slide 71. Notice the "Can you handle the zombie yetis" section. It's implied that it was initially added on this release
  • Also, it appears that the Zombie Yeti was supposed to be Ice Level-exclusive.
  • The Zombie Yeti and Ice Level were added on the April Fools build (0.93), the latter being scrapped in later development possibly due to the difficulty of the minigame (as shown in slide 73).
• The time taken between the 0.92 and 0.93 is 5 months (from Halloween to April Fools), suggesting that the development cycle goes rather slowly.
• It looks like on version 0.92, the level indicator that's normally visible on the left side of the level progress wasn't implemented yet. It's implemented in version 0.93 as the Ice Level screenshot suggests.
  • The UI buttons were also completely different in 0.92, as they reused the old elements from Insaniquarium. This was changed in 0.93 with the one present in the final release, save for the same level progress indicator from 0.92 and the use of Dwarven Stonecraft font for the level indicator.
• There's a screenshot of the build comments that's covered behind the rest of the screenshots in slide 59.
• The chart showing the "seconds to win level" in slide 5 appears to use the internal names for the minigames just like the one in LawnStrings.txt
  

  The slide that mentions a Hunter Zombie-esque zombie
  

  Slide 59 build comment screenshot
  

  The chart in slide 67. Notice the use of internal names.