When Richard Lemarchand, former lead designer at Naughty Dog, tweets that Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine is “every bit as awesome as you’d hoped” it’s worth stopping to take note. Lemarchand, now an associate professor of Interactive Media at USC, had nabbed a beta-key and, evidently, enjoyed the experience.
But this isn’t the game’s only accolade. Way back in 2010, after just 13 weeks of development, it picked up an Indie Games Festival Award, and has been hotly anticipated ever-since, especially following appearances at PAX where it drew admiring press coverage.
IGN spoke to the game’s designer Andy Schatz from Pocketwatch Games, to try to find out everything that’s worth knowing.
It’s a top-down battle between you and a security system. Get in, sneak past guards, disable locks, steal stuff. At your disposal is a gang of individuals offering crucial skills. Should you use the locksmith, the mole or the pickpocket?
Of course, heist-fiction is all about highly specialized individuals, immaculately dressed, mooching around shimmering locations with nefarious schemes to outwit the authorities and pocket the stones. (For the cinematic archetype, watch Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief).
It’s about tension, suspense, timing and knowing when to scarper. Hiding and sneaking are all well and good. But sooner or later, you’re going to be chased.
Schatz explains, “I want to give the player a sense of a heist movie, where there’s moments of frantic action and then a lot of tension, because you only have half a second left to open the safe or disarm the bomb or whatever it is.”
Early in the game it is possible to ghost levels, but Schatz says he didn’t want the experience to be all about sneaking.
"There’s always a rise and fall to the action a number of times throughout the level. You should expect to be seen and chased. I want that to be a positive experience, not something that feels like failure. That’s one of the things I don’t enjoy about stealth games, how much failure there is and how often you have to reload your save.”
When you think about stealth, your mind probably goes to first- and third-person games like Dishonored, Metal Gear Solid and Thief. Monaco, like last year's Hotline Miami (which also incorporated elements of stealth) is a top-down game, with one unique mechanic; the player can see all 360 degrees, but only in direct-line-of sight. For the unwary and the rash, surprises lurk behind obstacles and around corners.
“With first-person games in general one problem is that your field of view is much smaller than your field of view in real life,” explains Schatz. “Stealth games require a ton of situational awareness. In real life you have nearly a 180-degree field of view. In a first-person game, your field of view is actually very small.
“Your situational awareness in a first-person stealth game is so narrow that it’s really hard to simulate the actual power that you have to understand your surroundings like in a real-life game such as paintball. Doing it from a top-down perspective and still having that fog of war, that sense of, ‘I don’t know what’s going to be around the next corner,’ but giving them 360 degrees of vision, I think is a better simulation of the amount of awareness that you have of your surroundings in real life.
Okay, so we’re not talking about Fez-eon lengths of development time here. Monaco has been underway since 2010. It just seems like a long time because the game shot to fame so early in its life, due to that IGF award.
Since then, it's changed significantly. Indeed, anyone who pre-orders the game can play the original demo as a bonus. Mainly, the changes are about how line-of-sight is displayed to the player.
When people see a video of Monaco for the first time, they’re like, ‘I have no idea what the hell just happened.’
Schatz recalls, “That old build of the game was all just programmer art, by me. It was a neat-looking game, all tile-based visibility. As you walked around, individual tiles would light up or darken down, based on whether or not you could see them, in real time.
“When you had four players on the same screen all moving around and tiles were lightening up and darkening down it looked like an active visual mosaic. But at the same time, it was difficult to read.
“I wanted to take this massive amount of symbolic information that we’re showing the player and really fine-tune and optimize the visual experience so that they could process all the information that’s going on the screen.”
The heist targets are complex 3D schematics that need to be navigated in two-dimensions. There’s a whole visual language to learn.
“We really depend on so much symbology in the game, iconography. When people see a video of Monaco for the first time, they’re like, ‘I have no idea what the hell just happened.’ There’s so much going on. But I do think that we’ve really optimized that visual experience so that when you’re actually playing the game, when you’re holding the controller, it’s pretty easy to understand what’s happening.”
Source : ign[dot]com
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