A Day in the Life isn’t quite an interview and isn’t quite a preview – it’s more of a story. It’s a day spent with a developer or studio without any outside structuring from our site. It’s like a job shadow for a job we’re not capable of doing. But at its heart, it’s an intimate look at the inner workings of a developer and whatever may arise during a day in their life.

I recently had the opportunity to head down to San Diego and spend a day with recent IGF winner Andy Schatz. His upcoming game Monaco won awards for both Excellence in Design and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize. As with the spirit of the piece, I drove to meet him with only a time and address, no real schedule or planning. I didn’t know if I’d be looking over his shoulder coding all day or if we’d be hawking copies of his older title Venture Africa to the tourists at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

Andy lives with his fiance Tierney up near the University Heights section of San Diego, with a beautiful view of a lush green ravine from over the top of his dual-monitor work station. As I arrived I was pounced on by an overly friendly cat, whose name is an ever-changing title and has never quite landed on a single one with much regularity. I figured it was appropriate for a developer, with their work being in a near-constant state of change.

His wedding was a mere month away, so I was lucky to fit into the calm before the storm to talk with him. He pulled some strong cups of coffee for us from a new French press, an early wedding gift, then we sat down to talk.

BACKGROUND

Andy’s a San Diego native, having jumped to the East Coast to attend Amherst College for a degree in computer science and fine art before returning to the West. The walls of his apartment echo this, with framed pieces of his own artwork peppering the walls. Presto Studios hired him as a level-design intern for an old Star Trek game during his time at Amherst, and after graduating he jumped into an actual position working with them on online and AI programming. From there, he worked with TKO Studios who were contracted by Electronic Arts to do some work on Medal of Honor and Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.

It was around starting work for TKO Studios that Andy first developed the idea for Monaco. So while it sounded like a lightning strike of an idea a few weeks before the IGF submission deadline, that wasn’t the case. He drafted up an entire Game Design Document for the title and even included it in his contract with TKO so that if he could get them to develop it, he wouldn’t get screwed over. I caught a glimpse of the document which shared a lot of ideas with the game he’s developing currently. At the time he had compared it to Pacman and Hitman, and it head more of a massively multiplayer element in which each player had their own mansion which served as a lobby to recruit more players and go out on heists. Since Monaco didn’t release eight years ago, you can guess that the concept didn’t quite fly at the time.

When Andy aimed to return to school to get a Masters in business, things didn’t quite go as he planned. The rejection letters rolled in and he found himself in a different kind of position. Using the wait time between applications and rejections, he was able to create Venture Africa, which he released to sales of around 100,000 copies.

His animal games focused on ecosystems. He wanted to bring a Sim City formula to a small number of animals, so that players would be able to affect the game world in a manner akin to the real environments. As mentioned, Venture Africa sold pretty well for a game he created entirely himself, so he was able to bring on some hired help to complete Venture Arctic. The second game in the Venture brand didn’t sell as well as the original, so when it came time to start developing the third game in the series, things were getting even tougher.

Andy took a break after Venture Arctic to do some contract work for an online “green” gaming portal called green.com (no longer in existence). While it fit his beliefs of environmental protection, it just didn’t come together as a success.

He moved on to the third title in the Venture world which was called Venture Dinosauria. This proved to be the toughest project he’d undertaken and he found himself tearing it down and reinventing things to the point where it never quite settled on, well, anything. So he found himself taking breaks from the project to work on other endeavors.

In these breaks, he turned to another medium of gaming he quite enjoyed – board and card games. He pulled out a prototype for the Venture Africa board game and began setting up the board. He explained an intricate series of rules involving migration routes, movement amidst mountains, water and plains and showed off the prototype playing pieces that featured an array of animals from the African plains. He’d garnered some interest from a German board game publisher, but their biggest note was that his game left very little room for surprise. It’s a skill-based game, meaning that the underdog has very little chance to pull an upset victory over a better player. In the world of board games, this is a negative. The best-selling board games are the ones that have an outside chance of either side winning at any moment.

If there’s someone who knows how to use his idle time, it’s definitely Andy Schatz, because a Monaco card game also exists. The card game version of the caper game involves a series of draws from the type of character, to the loot stolen, and a “rat out your friends” style card which is similar to a get out of jail free. The game is played to gather the most loot cards, and deciding just how cooperative you want to be with the people you’re playing with. It’s almost the exact same idea as the current Monaco version in development, only with the physical aspect of the cards.

Later in the day I asked him about his favorite games, the ones that had the most effect on him. He had quite a few, but they were a balance of actual impact to the games he played for “sport.” Here’s a few from his list: Ultima 3 & 4, X-Com, Sim City, Fallout, M.U.L.E., and he “played the hell out of Command and Conquer and Doom 2.” But the latter fall more within the sport category, which did not have a deep impact on this developer. In his early years, gaming was a “bonding experience with dad.” I was surprised to hear he’d never played Sierra’s Ecoquest series, the educational games veiled as adventure titles that seem to fit somewhere near his own environmental philosophies.

When asked about where his passion for nature games came from, Andy told me, “My dad and I spent a lot of time camping and backpacking as a kid. Being in the wilderness connected me to the games we played as a kid, and so when I was outside, I could live those fantasy worlds from Ultima and King’s Quest. To me, the animals are really a vehicle for imagining the wilderness. The animals are just representative of the wild for me.”

DAY TO DAY

As he’s a lone indie without an actual office to go into, Andy balances his time working in his home, his dining room and nearby coffee shops populated with curious eccentric people. He claims that despite the beautiful view, he actually spends the least amount of time in his office proper.

His actual work flow involves an extremely organized bug list, stored in the always helpful Google Docs, which allows him to jump from one job to another, depending on what interests him on any given day. While a lot of the day was a compression of his life for example’s sake, he was able to get some solid work done while we idled in a coffee shop to the light serenading of a trumpeter outside the window.

There’s a notebook of sketches Andy carries around, from which he showed me some new concept art he’s working on for the game. He’s looking at taking it into a graphic-novel-type area to really showcase the characters’ personalities and differences. From “The Rat” sketch which depicts a snitch, hands up in surrender and fingers crossed, to “The Locksmith,” which is the lumbering powerhouse that might pull you out of some tight situations in the game. From the simple graphics revealed at the Independent Games Festival, this is definitely a new direction for the game.

Andy asked at one point, “have you heard of local minima?” I hadn’t. It’s a theory of discovery, in which if you view a medium as a two-dimensional plane, it’s a series of peaks and valleys which depict different levels of discovery. In terms of gaming, if you consider the platformer, we’ve almost gotten to the bottom of its valley. Even Braid only gets a little deeper in the same formula, Andy points out. “We haven’t found the Marianas Trench of gaming,” he says with a smile. So for every indie game that feels completely “out there,” it’s really just a new peak that others will begin exploring downward. As each new peak is explored, it turns into a situation where we’re discovering the best of that type, not the best of all types. This leaves a lot of room for growth in the medium of gaming.

On a note on creation in general Andy stated, “Innovation is cut by numbers. When you have two people, you have half the innovation.” It seems like the right sentiment for someone working alone, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth noting.

Halfway through the day, we headed out for lunch and met up with another indie developer, Matt Shores from Empty Clip Studios. This is an element of the indie world that truly showcases how approachable it is. Where else can two people who are technically competitors get together to air their grievances, talk shop, gossip and help solve each other’s problems? Matt’s currently working on a game called Symphony that Empty Clip announced last fall. It’s a space shoot-’em-up that uses your own music library to generate the levels and enemies. The real kicker is that it encourages you to explore a wide range of music, in such that you might discover a new type of weapon from an obscure track. As an example, he suggested snagging your sister’s Beyonce track. All in all, it’s fantastic to see two guys who had paid their dues in the AAA industry (Matt has worked with LucasArts, Stormfront and Electronic Arts among other companies) now working on projects they feel truly passionate about.

THE GAME

While his past speaks volumes to where he is today, Andy’s main focus these days is working on Monaco. I previewed the game back at IGF, but he’s added a lot to it and still has plans for many more changes before he takes the game out to show again. He won’t be at E3, but he’s planning the next big showcase to be at PAX this September.

The biggest change to Monaco that I was able to witness was the implementation of vector-based lighting. Rather than using the negative space to cover up what you can’t see, Andy’s added a system of lighting that shows off the positive space and only shows what you can see. So as your character moves around the game world, you’re able to see jagged sight lines where walls and columns are blocking your path. The negative space created by this new graphic system gives the world almost a three-dimensional feel, where the shadowed posts seem to reach out of the monitor toward you. He was working on adding a blur effect to the jagged lines to make it more realistic, so I couldn’t snag any new screens to show you…just yet.

Also he’s trying to decide how to implement a blueprint system to each level. Currently, the areas you can’t see are just darkly shaded, but you can still see the basic layout. He’s considering dropping that visibility to zero, so that you have to enter into each level looking for a blueprint before you’re able to see a bit more about your location. The same effect may be acquired by hacking into a computer.

Other new additions are that of dogs. While the art wasn’t complete, he showed off a test level in which the character could both hide in an air duct, and rush around trying to avoid a dog that chases him by scent, rather than site. So you have to escape pretty far from a dog before it’s unable to chase you anymore.

There is also now a disguise system that makes you invisible from guards. The on-screen character dawns a suit and tie in order to blend in. This change doesn’t dissuade dogs from trying to chew your leg off, though.

While he’d mentioned a few on his Twitter and Facebook pages, this was my first introduction to the four characters not shown off at IGF. He’s simplified each class down to two skills, one active and one passive. The new characters I saw were:

The Redhead – This sultry go-getter has the ability to seduce her way through the guards in a mansion.

The Gentleman – This classy fellow has the ability to disguise himself at any time and can heal other players with a whiskey flask he carries.

The Rat – The main ability of this class is just as the title says, he can rat out his teammates so that guards will pursue them leaving himself unharmed.

Boom Boom – This non-subtle class carries C4, another new item to the game. With explosives, characters can create new entrances to previously inaccessible areas.

From what I saw in March to now, these additions bring great balance to the title. And with mid-level drop-in, drop-out co-op, the ease of multiplayer should be fantastic.

Andy’s currently adding a World Map to the game, which will flesh out the story side of the title. I was shown the final level of the game, which is an epic multi-level palace which to this layman looks impossible. Its design is tight and full to the brim of items, secret entrances and a final prize in the basement. The final game should ship with twenty to twenty-one levels when all is said and done. The game will also include a level editor so that players can build and share their own heist stories.

A frustration for Andy is the fact that there’s no surprise in playing through levels he’s built himself. He’d love to hire a level designer (if he could) so that he might get a fresh look at his creation.

On the story front, Andy’s been concocting a series of descriptive texts which feel poetic in tone that will help shape the arc of the story from inception to end. And as mentioned before he’s aiming for a graphic novel approach to the way its told in between levels.

He’s doing a solid job of keeping the Facebook Fan page updated, so between now and PAX, that will be the best source of new information outside of DIYGamer’s own musings on its progress.

THE FUTURE

So what’s next for Andy?

As gamers we’re hoping it’s all Monaco all the time, but in reality he has a wedding in his near future. I got the opportunity to meet his lovely fiance at the end of our day, so I wish them all the best.

On a hint of where things are headed, Andy told me he’s in talks with a well-known artist to bring a new look to the game. For me its logo and iconic block characters have been ingrained in my mind, so I’m quite curious to see who might be coming to the table as well as how they’re going to make things look. He’s also still in talks with a variety of platforms, so there’s no confirmation on which system the game will land on.

Special thanks to Andy and his fiance for letting me into their home to chat.

For more information on Monaco, you can visit its official website, the Facebook page or follow the game on Twitter.