Monkeys and Typewriters

“Monkeys and typewriters” is a small little “card game” my friends and I developed for the first Uni Ulm game jam (More about that in my blog post).

Short revision of the game logic: You have to navigate a starship through a space full of asteroids and collect coins. The space is represented by a square grid and you can only navigate or execute actions by playing the according cards. The cards are given to you randomly by three monkeys. Each monkey has a contingent of three cards from which he randomly hands to you. You can fill up the contingent with default cards or with cards you bought from the shop. However, you best get to know the game by learning by doing ;)

As this game was developed in 48 hours, the structure of the code is actually not that beautiful. We used Unity as a game engine, which made such a game in such a short time frame even possible in the first place, and in the beginning we came up with a basic structure in a standard object oriented way. Key classes are the monkey, the card and the grid classes.

card class

The card class implements the logic that happens when a card is played. Therefore, the cards implement specifically designed interfaces, so that all cards can be handled the same way.

monkey class

The monkey class handles the card storing and the random card generation logic. During runtime, three objects of this type exist representing the three monkeys in the game.

grid class

The grid class handles all the cells and manages the movement and destruction of all the elements. Also, the whole generation of the grid is handled, so that it could theoretically be changed in size.

Two other important classes are the player class, which handles the ship movement and health, and the game manager, which handles the overall game logic. As we used Unity, we could use many built in features, and could also use many workarounds to get things working “quick and dirty”. For example we have many standalone monobehavior scripts which are attached to UI elements such as the coin counter to keep the UI updated.

Overall, while this is definitely one of the least clean games we developed, we still achieved to maintain a structure which we can work on and which could be even enhanced in the future. However, as the software is already submitted and rated as it is, we will just keep it as it is, nevertheless, you can have a look at it by yourself here, or you just enjoy playing the final result on itch.io!