Andy Schatz

Andy Schatz
Andy Schatz at the Independent Games Festival in 2010
Born	March 9, 1978 San Diego, California
Occupation(s)	Video game designer CEO of Pocketwatch Games
Known for	Pocketwatch Games
Notable work	Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, Tooth and Tail
Spouse	Tierney Schatz

Andy Schatz (/sjhɒts/; born March 9, 1978) is a video game designer based in San Diego. He began developing video games at a young age and contributed to the California State Science Fair in 1995. He graduated from Amherst College. After graduating, he worked for various video game development companies, including TKO Software, before founding his own independent video game development studio, Pocketwatch Games, in 2004. With Pocketwatch Games, Schatz has released four video games: Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, Monaco: What's Yours is Mine, and Tooth and Tail.

Life

Early years

Andy Schatz was born in San Diego to a geophysicist father and a philosophy professor mother. At the age of four, Schatz received a Commodore 64, which sparked his desire to create video games. By the age of seven, Schatz had designed maze games and applied BASIC scripts to make them work. When he was in seventh grade, he had coded a game he called Servants of Darkness, a "Warlords-esque game" for the Commodore 64. Through his game development, he was invited to the California State Science Fair in 1995. He later enrolled at Amherst College, from where he graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Fine Arts. His first job out of college was at viral marketing firm e-tractions, where he helped create a virtual Christmas snowglobe.

Career

Logo for Pocketwatch Games, Schatz' independent video game studio

Schatz' introduction to the video game industry was in 1995 at Netplay, an online gaming portal. He then worked for Presto Studios, where he helped develop the first commercially released game he had worked on, Star Trek: Hidden Evil. He temporarily left Presto Studios to work for e-tractions, a marketing group, only to later return 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 others. During a time when the development team had nothing to work on, Schatz proposed a prototype of a game he had been working on which was described as being "a house-robbing game" in which 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 get very far. Before TKO shut down in 2005, Schatz had founded Pocketwatch Games, an independent video game development studio as a sole proprietorship (in December 2004).

The first game Schatz developed and released was Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa (2005), a tycoon game designed to appeal to the same audience as Zoo Tycoon (2001). Set in the African wilderness, the game focused on balancing the ecosystem, species relationships and weather cycles, among other themes. It was successful, becoming an Independent Games Festival (IGF) finalist, and helped Schatz' secure the budget for the sequel: Venture Arctic (2007). Venture Arctic had the same premise as Venture Africa, and while some critics praised it, including winning Gametunnel's simulation game of the year in 2007, it had complications that players did not enjoy, and as a result, was comparatively a commercial failure. Following this, Schatz was hired by Jim Safka, co-founder of Match.com, to develop a flash game for Green.com. This contract slowly waned, and Schatz began to work on Venture Dinosauria. Venture Dinosauria was cancelled before it's 2009 release date, and, looking back, Schatz said he had failed to find "a way to make it both fun and open-ended, but also a small, self-contained experience at the same time". Throughout this time, Schatz was interested in expanding Pocketwatch Games from being a studio to a business and applied for enrollment in various business schools. He was never accepted, something he now considers to be "the biggest blessing of [his] entire career".

Screenshot of Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine

Andy Schatz and previous Seumas McNally Grand Prize winners Petri Purho and Erik Svedang pictured after Schatz' award in 2010

In 2009, Schatz, feeling despondent after the previous failure, began learning XNA to enable him develop games for both PC and Xbox 360. After being rejected from business school, he began to disregard the idea and focused on making "whatever game you're passionate about in the moment". In 2009, he was low on cash and gave himself a final chance before getting "a corporate job", starting to code a game with inspiration from Hitman and other games, while resembling Pac-Man without the ghosts. This was the foundation for Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine (2013) and within a week, Schatz had added enemies, ambience, and abilities. Shortly thereafter, he began to look over design documents he made years prior. 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. Still unfinished, these awards allowed Schatz to continue to work on what Polygon described as "a magnificent return to the four-player couch madness of '90s console games". Schatz originally planned to release the game on the Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) marketplace, but, having received these awards, changed his mind, describing XBLIG as being "a roll of the dice".

Soon after, Valve Corporation (the company behind Steam) and Schatz began discussing the idea of selling the game on Steam. Prior to this, he had planned to contact Microsoft to discuss selling the game on the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). Schatz's idea was rejected by Microsoft on the account of marketability. Microsoft gave him another chance, and with a "no-risk loan" of $100,000 from the Indie Fund, he continued to work on the game. In 2011, Microsoft rejected the game again. Around the same time, hackers had compromised the PlayStation Network databases, putting paid to Schatz' plans to port it to PlayStation 3. Despite these issues, he persisted with the idea to get the game on consoles. It was around this time that Schatz met San Diego-born Andy Nguyen. Nguyen took interest in Monaco due to its accolades and sent Schatz a cold call e-mail asking if he needed "a beta tester within walking distance". Because Schatz was becoming increasingly desperate for additional feedback, he hired Nguyen, whose input reaffirmed Schatz' desire to work on Monaco, and later partnered with Majesco Entertainment to get the game released on XBLA.

Schatz met composer Austin Wintory during the development of Monaco. Initially, the former was using licensed music with an "old timey, silent era piano style", but Schatz contacted Wintory and proposed the idea of replacing some of the licensed music with original music. They began to discuss it in more depth as Schatz knew of Wintory's work on Flow and Journey. Wintory eventually pursuaded Schatz into creating a whole soundtrack. Wintory noted in an interview with IndieGames.com that Schatz was the one who created the premises for each part of Monaco's soundtrack. Schatz would present Wintory with an idea and he would compose for it; Wintory recalls thinking that "when else am I ever going to be asked to write anything remotely like this". This process was unlike the one he had while working with Thatgamecompany, where he would make a suggestion and it would be discussed formally.

Screenshot of Tooth and Tail

Having released the final content pack for Monaco, development for Tooth and Tail (2017) began in March 2014. The premise was loosely based on a design Schatz and college roommate Tom Wexler had made, called DinoDrop. The game was originally codenamed Armada and was initially designed to be gamepad friendly as Schatz believed there had been no "good" RTS games that utilized them. During the development, Schatz noted he wanted to act in a similar fashion as with Monaco, 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. Nothing was definite at this point in time, including the title and theme.

The title was subsequently changed to Lead to Fire. During this stage of development, the game took inspiration from Hearthstone, an online collectible card game. Around the same time, the development for the game began being broadcast through Twitch.tv; Schatz called it a "miniature PAX"; a way to discuss the development with the fans. The title "Lead to Fire" lasted for around a year before being changed to Tooth and Tail. The change was attributed to the developers being discontent with the former title. The official title is a reference to the tooth-to-tail ratio. The finalised art style was also announced around the same time, with some comparing it to a modernized version of 1990's pixel art. Schatz wrote that similar to the development of the art for SpyParty; "the game should look utterly shitty until it’s absolutely amazing." Wintory also composed the soundtrack for Tooth and Tail.

Personal life

Schatz lives with his wife, Tierney Schatz, in San Diego.

Design philosophy

Tooth and Tail's controls, an example of how Schatz' desire to make games with semi-simplistic controls

When designing video games, Schatz prefers to take influence from non-game concepts, such as films and real-life events. From this point, he uses gaming themes to translate it into a playable video game. This trope was used heavily during Monaco's development as it was substantially influenced by 1960 heist film Ocean's 11. This was 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," with both "Monaco and Tooth and Tail's controls [being] directly inspired by the simplicty". In addition to their simplicity, Schatz designs games that look "simple on their face but are driven by complex machinery".

Games developed

Game	Release date	Platform	Refs
Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa	October 2005	Microsoft Windows, macOS
Venture Arctic	2007	Microsoft Windows, macOS
Venture Dinosauria	Cancelled
Monaco: What's Yours is Mine	2013	Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Xbox 360	—
Tooth and Tail	September 12, 2017	Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation 4

External links

• Official website for Pocketwatch Games