User blog:Tecku/Tecku Talks: Mushrooms

Hello, and welcome to Tecku Talks, a blog series where I give my anaylsis on some mechanics of the PzZ franchise. And to start us off, Tecku talks about: mushrooms!

A lot of people seem to be split about whether mushrooms in PvZ2 should have kept their PvZ1 mechanic, or if the new systems is better. In my opinion, they should have kept their old mechanic. To explain why, though, we should look at the purpose behind the mushrooms.

In the original game, the mushroom were meant to be a cheap resource for the nighttime levels. They would cost much less than the daytime plants, which let them serve as a staple defense where there was little to no sun. From a designer standpoint, using mushrooms was a brilliant idea. Although mushrooms are not actually plants, they were several advantages to this system:

- Mushrooms are often assosiated with shaded areas and darkness. The idea of mushrooms only being useable in the dark can be understandable to the player. Other plants, like cabbages and sunflowers, are not associated with night.

- By dedicating mushrooms to night, Popcap could dedicate plant species to certain conditions without over-complicating the name. Using the "shroom" suffix directly told the player a clear, consice message: this is one of those plants you can only use at night. If Popcap had been forced to make nighttime plants out of cucumbers or apples, they would have been added an out a place prefix, like "Dark Cucumber" or "Evil Apple". These words seems out of place, and generally don't work.

- Since most people aren't familiar with the categorization of mushrooms, Popcap had more leeway in their mechanic design. When you think about it, the name "Magnet Shroom" isn't very clever. However, we don't mind it as much as we would if we saw a name like "Magnet Celery" or especially "Dark Magnet Celery".

- The Coffee Bean system gave player a lot of new choices. Many mushrooms like Fume-Shroom, Magnet Shroom, and Hypo-Shroom were very potent, but would become very overpowered in the daytime. By using the Coffee Bean, players were not only straddled with +50 Sun cost, but he use of another seed slot. This gave the players a lot of options, but they would have to choose wisely.

-TBC after lunch.