STP - Challenge your mind and let your creative juices flow in this innovative strategy game that's bound to become an all-time favorite.
As the popularity of social and casual games continues to rise, differentiating yourself from your competitors via careful targeting -- and exploring themes that are nontraditional for games -- might provide an advantage.
Instead of creating games that appeal to a broader population -- for instance, one that that's highly generalized, like the wildly popular FarmVille or Diner Dash -- they seem to be targeting, say, connoisseurs of specific foods, like wine lovers in the Facebook game My Vineyard or chocolate aficionados in Chocolatier and its two sequels, the latest being Chocolatier: Decadence By Design.
What's going on here? What could possibly be the strategy behind going after such nontraditional thematic niches?
In her latest entertaining Gamasutra analysis, designer Emily Short looks at the interaction between fiction and gameplay in PlayFirst's Chocolatier: Decadence by Design for PC -- which she says offers "unabashed dessert pornography".
Casual Gameplay writes: "After the war ended - World War II, that is - people all around the world were ready for something nice and sweet. Luckily, the famous Chocolatiers, Baumeister Confections, managed to keep afloat during those difficult times, and can still satisfy the world's sweet tooth. Unfortunately, Alex Tangye, the sweet heiress, who you might remember from Chocolatier 2, has bigger problems on her mind than chocolate. Her husband, Sean, is missing, still lost at war. She wants to go looking for him, but to do that, she'll need to leave her chocolate factories in good hands: yours."
