Babel Monkeys (Incremental Typing )

The pitch

A typing incremental about you and your monkeys filling out the Library of Babel. Type words, complete pages, hire more monkeys, unlock more of the library, and eventually build your own pages out of whatever text you want.

Inspired by the infinite monkey theorem and the Library of Babel. Originally built to teach my niece to type, then my incremental brain took over.

BEST IN FULL SCREEN

This is a ground-up overhaul of the original Babel Monkeys. If you played my previous version, expect a very different experience — I tore the game apart and rebuilt it around what was actually working.

What's changed

A lot of the old pain points have been addressed:

• Replaying tutorials view previously seen tutorials via the settings tab.
• No more cheesing Babel Pages have replaced word lists, so previous cheese methods no longer work, will something else break the game? Probably. You tell me!
• Removed feature bloat. The piggy bank, prestiging, star currency, and bill currency are all gone. They added layers without adding fun.
• Monkeys type with you from the very first moment. You're not playing a solo typing game that eventually becomes a monkey game — it's a monkey game from minute one.

More Library of Babel-forward

The whole game now points at the Library of Babel instead of treating it as a late-game side activity. The focus is on you and your monkeys completing Babel pages.

I built my own Library of Babel address system. It keeps the spirit of the original libraryofbabel.info — every possible page exists at a specific address — but breaks the location down into more layers than just shelf / wall / book and one huge hex address. 

Two ways to play

When you start a new game, you pick how you want to learn:

• Full Keyboard — the whole keyboard is unlocked from the start. For people who already type and just want to play the incremental.
• Learning Mode — you unlock letters one by one, the way the original game worked. Good for newer typists (this game started as something to teach my niece to type).

Endgame

The endgame is unlocking the Babel Tools — once you've earned them, you can:

• Create your own pages.
• Upload your own text and add it as typing pages in your game.

So if you want to grind out Hamlet one Babel page at a time, you can.

About balancing

Balancing is still a ways off from where I want it. My hands are cramping from typing and testing, so that's why I need other testers now. And I can only balance against my own typing speed,  I am only one person with one set of fingers. If something feels too slow, too fast, too grindy, or too generous, please tell me. That feedback is crucial for the feel of the game. 

Future Updates

I am still working on adding things to the game; more upgrades, minigames, word/sentence/book pools. But I had to cut myself off from adding new things, I want to make sure the core loop works smooth and have that figured out and then I have a list of things I would love to add once I have more solid ground.