Plants vs Kirby was developed as a team of two. It is a physical strategy game that stays true to both of the original games. One player plays as the Plants which is the defender. Their goal is to K.O. both hero characters on the attacker's side being Kirby and Meta Knight. Doing this wins the defender the game. For the Kirby team to win, the attacker needs to clear a row over to the other side of the grid.

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Each card has its own special ability that can be used during the game. The Plants retaining their regular abilities from Plants vs Zombies such as the Peashooter shooting a pea, or the Puff-Shroom shooting fumes. The Kirby cards have abilities based on their in game counterparts. Waddle Doo can fire a laser, and Kirby can copy Plant abilities.

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During development, the game needed a lot of balance tuning. The defender side was way too strong initially when the goal was just to K.O. Kirby. Kirby would be K.O.'d in about 5 turns, and the attacker needed to clear a row twice to win. Looking at this, we changed the attacker side to only clear one row, and added Meta Knight so that the defender had to K.O. two characters, giving the attacker an extra chance. New cards were added at this stage as well to directly counteract powerful cards. This evened everything out, and our play tests went down to the wire, leaving the final move up to chance of what was drawn from the deck next.

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The design of the game was to be a combination of skill and chance. Skill being planning moves on the grid, and chance being drawing from the deck. This allows for the games to always be close, as a better player can't outright win with pure skill, and keeps it enjoyable for everyone. When coming up with the idea, we couldn't decide which series to base the game on, so we came up with a collaboration idea in choosing Plants vs Zombies and Kirby. This ended up working really well, and we got to express the uniqueness of both games. In the end we were really proud of the game we had created.