Andy Schatz

Andy Schatz (; born March 9, 1978) is a video game designer based in San Diego. He began developing video games at a young age and graduated from Amherst College. After graduation, he worked for various video game development companies, including TKO Software, before founding his own independent video game development studio Pocketwatch Games in 2004. Attempting to expand his company, Schatz tried enrolling into business school; all applications were rejected. As a result, he began working on games he was passionate about. Schatz has released five video games under Pocketwatch Games: Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, Tooth and Tail, and Monaco 2. His design philosophy revolves around taking inspiration from already existing media, such as films, and transforming it into a video game.

Early life Andy Schatz was born in San Diego. His father was a geophysicist, his mother a philosophy professor. At the age of four, Schatz received a Commodore 64, which sparked his desire to create video games. By the age of seven, he had designed maze games and applied BASIC scripts to make them work. When he was in seventh grade, he developed code for a game he called Servants of Darkness, a "Warlords-esque game" for the Commodore 64.

Career Early career and TKO Software Schatz' first job after college was at the viral marketing firm e-tractions, where he helped create a virtual Christmas snowglobe. He left Presto Studios temporarily to work for e-tractions again, only to return later to help with the AI on the Xbox Live version of Whacked! (2002). After leaving Presto Studios, Schatz moved to Santa Cruz to work for TKO Software, and in the early 2000s helped develop Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Breakthrough (2003) and GoldenEye: Rogue Agent (2004) among other games. During a time when the development team had nothing to work on, Schatz proposed a prototype of a game he had been working on described as "a house-robbing game" where players would build a home and defend it, then attempt to break into other players' homes. He sent this prototype to Microsoft, but it did not interest them.

2004–2014: Pocketwatch Games' inception and Monaco

Schatz founded Pocketwatch Games, an independent video game development studio as a sole proprietorship in December 2004, before TKO shut down in 2005. it had complications that players did not enjoy. As a result, it was a commercial failure compared to Venture Africa. It was cancelled before its 2009 release date.

In 2009, Schatz, feeling despondent after the failure of Venture Dinosauria, began learning Microsoft XNA to enable him to develop games for both PC and Xbox 360. that resembled Pac-Man without the ghosts. This was the foundation of Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine (2013) and within a week Schatz had added enemies, ambience, and abilities. Shortly after, he began to look over design documents he made years earlier. After fifteen weeks of development, he had a prototype that won two IGF 2010 awards—the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Excellence in Design award. With the game still unfinished, these awards allowed Schatz to continue to work on what became, as Polygon described, "a magnificent return to the four-player couch madness of '90s console games". development of Tooth and Tail (2017) began in March 2014. The premise was loosely based on a design Schatz, and college roommate Tom Wexler, had developed called Dino Drop. The game was originally codenamed Armada and was initially designed to be gamepad friendly as Schatz believed there had been no "good" real-time strategy (RTS) games that utilized them. During development Schatz noted he wanted Armada to act in a similar fashion as Monaco. He did this by taking the control system and "constraining [it] in order to make the actual, physical interaction easy to pick up without limiting the complexity of the game itself". At the Game Developers Conference, Schatz asked several people for their opinions and received positive feedback. During this stage of its development, the team took inspiration from Blizzard Entertainments design strategy in their ability to simplify complex mechanics. Around the same time, the game's development began being broadcast on Twitch. Schatz called it a "miniature PAX (gaming festival)", a way to discuss the development with fans. The developers were unhappy with the title Lead to Fire and changed it to Tooth and Tail about a year later. The official title is a reference to the tooth-to-tail ratio. The finalized art style was also announced around the same time, with some comparing it to a modernized version of 1990s pixel art. Schatz wrote that like the development of the art for SpyParty, "the game should look utterly shitty until it's absolutely amazing".

In March 2022, Monaco 2 was announced. Schatz noted that the game features 3D graphics as opposed to Monaco 2D top-down view, as well as incorporating procedural level generation. Monaco 2 retains the stealth and heist genres, though there is new characters introduced for players to select when playing through the game.

Personal life Schatz lives with his wife, Tierney Schatz, in San Diego. as it was substantially influenced by the 1960 heist film Ocean's 11. This is also seen in the plot of Tooth and Tail, given it is set during the Russian Revolution. Schatz also tries to make the controls of each video game intuitive to allow the player to become more immersed in the gameplay. He mentioned Geometry Wars as being one of the games that inspired this design philosophy, saying he has "never played a game with better controls". The controls of both Monaco and Tooth and Tail are "directly inspired by the simplicity" of those of Geometry Wars. Schatz designs games that look "simple on their face but are driven by complex machinery".

Games developed