His design philosophy revolves around taking inspiration from already existing media, such as films, and transforming it into a video game.

[4] Schatz' first job after college was at the viral marketing firm e-tractions, where he helped create a virtual Christmas snowglobe.

[6] He left Presto Studios temporarily to work for e-tractions again,[7] only to return later to help with the AI on the Xbox Live version of Whacked!

[3] 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.

Set in the African wilderness, the game focused on a number of themes including balancing the ecosystem, species' relationships and weather cycles.

It was a success and became an Independent Games Festival (IGF) finalist helping Schatz' secure the budget for the sequel: Venture Arctic (2007).

[8] 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".

[11] 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.

[2] Having been rejected by business schools, he slowly discarded that idea and focused on making "whatever game [I'm] passionate about in the moment".

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.

Nguyen took an interest in Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine thanks to the accolades it had received and sent Schatz a cold call e-mail asking if he needed "a beta tester within walking distance".

[2] Because Schatz was becoming increasingly desperate for more feedback, he hired Nguyen, whose input reaffirmed his desire to work on Monaco.

They began to discuss it in more depth as Schatz knew of Wintory's work on Thatgamecompany's Flow and Journey.

The premise was loosely based on a design Schatz, and college roommate Tom Wexler, had developed called Dino Drop.

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".

[18][19] During this stage of its development, the team took inspiration from Blizzard Entertainment's design strategy in their ability to simplify complex mechanics.

Schatz noted that the game would feature 3D graphics as opposed to Monaco's 2D top-down view, as well as incorporating procedural level generation.

Monaco 2 will retain the stealth and heist genres, though there will be new characters introduced for players to select when playing through the game.

[26] Schatz also tries to make the controls of each video game intuitive to allow the player to become more immersed in the gameplay.