Chapter 21
After a good night’s rest, Chen Mo grabbed some breakfast and performed the usual brushing and washing while waiting for his mental peak. When he was at his most awake, he used the Memory Playback Potion and started looking through his forgotten memories.
His memory of the game was murky, as Plants vs Zombies was released a while ago. Chen Mo was diligent when going through his memory, as any of it could contain important details about the game, which could affect the quality of his clone.
The effects of the Potion settled in quickly, and Chen Mo returned to his memories from many years ago.
The first memories were the shapes of the plants: dragon-like peashooter[1], a certain-singer-whose-last-name-is-Gao-looking squash, the potato mine with the joystick on its head, the sunflower with the mysterious smile, the walnut with its eyes open like light bulbs…
1After that were the various types of zombies: normal zombie, conehead zombie, pole-vaulting zombie, buckethead zombie, football zombie, dancing zombie…
The tempo was alright. Chen Mo proceeded to test out a couple other zombies and plants, which had no problem. Other than adjusting a few numbers that didn’t feel quite right, everything else was OK.
Afterwards Chen Mo worked on the zones and level design.
Making the level flow was a highly technical part of level design. It needed to stimulate the player, not overwhelm the player.
Chen Mo had taken down a bunch of details on the layout of each level. The approximate numbers of zombies per level and when the plants were unlocked were all recorded, which made it a lot easier.
In five days time Chen Mo fully developed the different zones and the flow of the levels, along with the tutorial. It seemed the adventure mode of Plants vs Zombies had been successfully recreated by Chen Mo.
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