Hello Crew!

Everyone knows we thieves can be a superstitious lot and our crew is no exception. Today, we’re diving into the Trinket system, a key feature that lets each thief carry unique charms to turn the tide of any heist.


Trinkets

During your time in Monaco, you and your crew will work to unlock four trinket abilities per character. Each trinket provides additional power and specialization, but as with all good things in life, power isn’t free. Equipping these trinkets costs a bit of your base health, so choosing wisely is key. Let’s take a closer look into the trinket abilities of Jobbie, our favorite little robot sidekick!

Jobbie’s core ability is teleportation. He can zip through all visible areas including windows, over furniture, and even through prison cell doors to escape the job undetected. Additional trinket abilities for Jobbie include:

• The GPU Array: Granting x4 teleporting speed.
  
• The Cardboard Box: Causes you to appear invisible without taking damage.
  
• The Worm: Infecting electronics with a deadly virus.
  
• The Wifi Extender: Significantly increases your teleporting range, which is particularly useful when navigating through replayed levels.

These trinket abilities are just the beginning as each master thief has a ton of variation to fit different play styles and to suit the challenges of each level. It will be up to you and your crew to figure out which trinkets are best on every heist!


Diamonds are a Thief’s Best Friend

Trinkets can be unlocked by collecting diamonds earned from completing missions quickly, along with bonus objectives like gathering all of the coins and escaping a job undetected. Use your trinkets wisely in the Hard Truth (seed-locked campaign levels) as you can only earn one diamond per level. But the real source of diamonds comes when jumping into the Unreliable Narrator mode, where the levels are shuffled ensuring no two heists play out the same way.


Get ready to experiment with a variety of trinkets as luck will have it when our upcoming co-op demo releases on February 20th ahead of Steam Next Fest. It's almost time to pocket your rewards in the city of Monaco!

Hello Crew!

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!