playcentric

Happy Easter!  After chowing down some chocolate bunnies this morning I was inspired to come up with an equally delicious game design

You are the owner of a fledgling chocolate store.  Your role as owner is to buy the supplies, make the chocolates, and run the store.  You start out with a base of ‘recipes’ for different chocolates.  By using different molds, different types of chocolate, different filling and different toppings users can make chocolates by following a base set of recipes they are given, or by experimenting and creating their own recipes.

The rest of the game design is somewhat predictable – users sell their chocolates and learn based on their sales what types sell the best, are responsible for buying supplies and can enlarge their inventory and number of recipes this way, and try and enlarge their store.  Ultimately players can hire other people to help run the store and to help them make chocolates.  The gameplay could be mixed up a little bit by adding in customer requests (ex: 20 of a particular type of chocolate) and holidays (red and green candy would sell better around Christmas time!)

What I love about this game design is that it allows players some creativity.  If a user wants to make a duck-shaped marshmallow-filled dark chocolate candy topped with sprinkles, go for it!  Maybe it will sell well!  By just starting players with a base set of recipes and encouraging and rewarding them for experimenting we are allowing the players to take some risks and come up with their own recipes.   Hopefully this game could walk that fine line where it provides players enough structure to build off of but also gives enough encouragement and feedback to users to express some true personality.