‘Monaco,’Last Year’s IGF Winner, Hides Levels In Jpegs» MTV Multiplayer

Take a look at the above screenshot. No, look closer. Closer! If you look carefully enough, there's a hidden world to be found.

Last year's winner of the Independent Games Festival was a game called"Monaco."Inspired by films like"Ocean's Eleven,""Monaco"is a top-down, co-op-centric stealth game wherein teams of four players play as thieves attempting to pull off a heist. Andy Schatz, the game's developer, spoke at this year's GDC about the process of making the game and revealed something very interesting about how he'll be offering level-sharing to players.

When"Monaco"releases ("don't ask,"said Schatz, regarding the release date), players will have a folder of playable levels. But when they open that folder, all they'll see are image files, and just one image file per level. So where's all the level data? Apparently a picture is worth at least a single level.

Here that same screenshot, with the bloom and menu removed:

Still, it's not clear where the level data exists in this image. But look to the left of the sun, in that patch of deep-blue sky. Here's a zoomed in version:

Yep, there it is, the level data. Because each of the levels are tiny in terms of data size (about 3KB), Schatz figured out a way to hide that data as pixels in a screenshot. That way, when you send a fancy screenshot of a level to a friend, they've already got everything they'll need to play it. Schatz admitted he took some cues from"Spore,"which allowed people to share creature creations with just an image, but no one has really done level sharing this way.

This was just one of many fascinating elements Schatz is working on for the full release of"Monaco."The version that won the IGF last year took just 15 weeks to create, but now, a year later, he's expanded the scope of the game tremendously, doubling the number of playable characters and reworking all of the lighting effects. It'll be a doozie when it releases...just don't ask Schatz when that is.

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