Digital Chocolate brewing up Cafe connected games
Casual games + community = hot 'n' tasty mobile gaming
Digital Chocolate is set to unleash one of the most ambitious mobile game concepts ever seen. It's called DChoc Café, and it's based around the sort of casual games that are readily available on mobile – solitaire, sudoku, and poker, for example.
However, its big innovation is the connected community it builds around them, enabling you to create and decorate your own café. The isometric graphics are reminiscent of online chatroom Habbo Hotel – no bad thing – and the personalisation doesn't stop there.
You also create your own avatar (character) to represent you in your café, and while playing the games you can win prizes to decorate your venue.
The idea behind DChoc Café is that you'll invite your friends to drop in and chat, play, and generally admire your trophies. Viral invitations are built into each game, making it easy for you to let friends know about your café, and how to get involved.
Free trials will also be built into the café concept, with players able to try new games as they come out, before deciding whether to pay to download them.
Five will be available initially, with one new game due to arrive every month thereafter. The first five are solitaire, sudoku, Mahjong, Hold 'em poker and kakuro, but on the slate for future months are hangman, blackjack, chess and bingo.
What else do you need to know? All the Café games are linked, so points and prizes earned in one will count in the others. The different games will have personalisation aspects, too, such as the way solitaire lets you change the colour of the cards, while Digital Chocolate also promises gameplay tutorials to ensure you're never left feeling a bit confused.
As you play more, your café will actually evolve, from a one-star to a Michelin-busting five-star establishment. There will also be competitions within the Café environment to win proper real-world prizes, as well as messages alerting you whenever a new Café game launches, with a link to buy it from your operator portal.
Oh, and there'll be a Café website and WAP site, too, to provide extra information on Café and its games.
At Pocket Gamer, we regularly moan that mobile publishers aren't doing enough to push connected games. Well, Digital Chocolate is making us eat our words – although, thankfully, Café is shaping up as a very tasty treat.
