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PopCap discusses the challenge of bringing Plants Vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and the Frostbite engine to Switch
When Plants Vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville "Complete Edition" comes to Switch, it'll be the very first game on the platform that uses the Frostbite engine. That required a huge undertaking from developer PopCap, but they were ready for the challenge. According to an interview with producer Melvin Teo on the How Games Make Money podcast, PopCap was planning to bring Battle for Neighborville to Switch from the start, and they knew it would present all kinds of hard work to make it happen.
“I mean we wanted to do this for a long time. When we first started Battle for Neighborville, that was always the plan. But we never had the time or the opportunity, so we didn’t when we first launched it back in 2019. But yeah, then we spent the last year and a half bringing it over to the Switch and making sure that frostbite worked on the platform because we are the first-ever Frostbite title to be launched on the Nintendo Switch.
“It was a massive technical undertaking. I remember when we first started and we managed to get the game to boot up and run. And it hit like 2 or 3 frames per second. It was a slideshow, and we had a lot of work to do.
We made a lot of really smart engineering decisions and optimizations to make it run at a steady 30 frames per second without compromising the visual quality of the game. The visual look and feel of the game is a big part of what gives you Battle for Neighborville — and PVZ in general — its charm and quality.”