As we work towards launch later this year, we wanted to take some time today to talk about the procedural generation within Monaco 2. No two heists will ever be the same as you and your crew work to take on new jobs and pull off the perfect heist!
The same map as the first, but at a different seed
The Main Campaign
Monaco 1 was chock-full of environmental story-telling and easter eggs, often accessed with the Mole. And while the game was great for speed-running, it did have a mild form of procedural generation that kept you on your toes, asking players to improvise rather than memorize. We wanted to expand on this with Monaco 2, without losing what was so special about the level design of the first game.
In Monaco 2, a procedural director stitches hand-authored rooms together using scripts created by our level designer. Then it finds locations for objectives and high-value targets, such as safes, and then starts to fill out enemy positions, traps, security, and other pickups to create a sense of rise and fall in the drama of a level.
But you’d never know this was happening. One of my favorite pieces of feedback we’ve received is that most first time players don’t even realize the levels are procedurally generated. On top of that, for the main campaign, we’re scouring the levels to find our favorite seeds and locking those in for the main campaign. Everyone’s first time playing through the campaign will be on the same maps, and leaderboards will track scores for those seeds.
Unreliable Narrator and Daily Heists
So if the main campaign is locked, why use procedural generation at all? Every heist movie has a planning scene, where the thieves scour a blueprint, figuring out how to best tackle an environment. If you’ve played the same level a million times, this phase is meaningless. But after beating any mission in the campaign, you can go back and play it again in Unreliable Narrator mode: randomized seeds where you can collect diamonds, which you can use to unlock additional character abilities and looks.
A Daily Heist mode also challenges players to tackle the campaign levels with increased difficulty and randomization.
Our intent is to make the main campaign feel like the Monaco experience fans know and love, while making the game infinitely replayable. Add in an opportunity to explore the map and plan the heist with your team and you’ll feel like you are planning a high stakes heist on every play through.
Assemble your dream team and get ready for a taste of the life of crime with our upcoming co-op demo available on February 20th ahead of Steam Next Fest. We’ll see you on the job!
