Development
Tucson, Arizona based Big Splash Games was formed in late 2005 by three veterans of the videogame industry: Jon Blossom, Stephen Lewis and Michael Wyman. They came together to produce a prototype video game for the casual market. They worked on this for a few months when they were not working (they still held jobs within the industry to support themselves). This prototype was pitched to a few publishers in order to gain feedback. PlayFirst, though not interested in the prototype, issued the team a request for proposal for an economic simulation game, hoping that Big Splash could produce another proposal. The next morning, Big Splash co-founder Stephen Lewis remembered that he had been told that some people, in particular women, "have an almost religious connection with chocolate". Taking this idea he quickly wrote a proposal and forwarded it to his two partners. After brainstorming the idea the team decided that it satisfied PlayFirst's request for proposal, forwarded a copy of the idea and received word from the publisher that they "had hit the nail on the head".
Chocolatier was designed to appeal to women aged between 35 and 55, a different market compared to the games previously developed by the trio. In order to immerse themselves in the subject matter during development, Big Splash's staff tasted as many variety of chocolates as they could find and took the Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker factory tour, where they witnessed the full "bean to bar" process. The factory mini-game was developed in order to give players a break from the economic side of the game, which involves buying low and selling high. It took approximately the same time to produce the mini-game as it did to create the rest of the game, which drained the developer's resources, though Stephen Lewis believed this was "the right decision". Journalists were sent Chocolatier-branded chocolate bars and "golden tickets" which allowed them to download the game for free, in order to promote the game's release. The game's sequel, Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients was first released on November 27, 2007. Chocolatier: Decadence by Design is the third installment, released in 2009. There is another installment called The Great Chocolate Chase: A Chocolatier Twist put out by PlayFirst.
Read more about this topic: Chocolatier (video Game)
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