A sequel to the hit Plants vs. Zombies game will be released by late spring 2013, PopCap Games announced this morning.

As the company puts it in a news release, the follow-up is “germinating and advancing with rigor.” The game will have a “bevy of new features, settings, and situations,” PopCap says, but beyond that, details are scarce.

PopCap, also known for titles including Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle, was acquired last year by Electronic Arts for up to $1.3 billion.

Plants vs. Zombies, originally released for PC and Mac in 2009, is now available across a variety of devices and platforms. Players use pea-shooting plants and other garden-related defenses to protect a home from an advancing wave of the undead.

The game was created by PopCap game designer George Fan. On the GeekWire podcast and radio show last year, PopCap co-founder John Vechey told the story behind Fan’s creation of the game.

“He wanted to make a tower-defense style game. First he needed something that was a tower. He was like, OK, what doesn’t move that has some personality? Plants! The second thing was, OK, what could attack the plants? Aliens. So he’s making this game, Plants vs. Aliens, essentially, and he was like, this stupid, these people have come to Earth in spaceships that can travel faster than light. They’ll destroy these plants. He was really bothered by this, because it felt stupid to have a slow-moving alien. Then he was like, what about zombies? And it just sprouted from there.”

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