Synopsis
There’s a carnival in town and your young son has been pestering you to go. You know you can’t afford it, but, after consulting with the wife, she convinces you to go.
Background
This game was written for PunyComp 2025. The theme required the player to interact with an animal in order to complete the game. That’s certainly an interesting theme, but I had no intention of entering the comp, due to other commitments, such as The BDB Project.
Submissions for the comp closed on 2 December 2025. Eleven hours, fifteen minutes before submissions closed, @fredrik sent a reminder on the PunyInform Discord server and asked if anyone was still working on their submission. I jokingly said “Is it too late to start?” and he responded “Go for it!” That sounded like a challenge!
By this time, there was 10.5 hours left and it was 11:30 p.m. local time, so I would have to write something quickly before going to bed. That gave me only 2 or 3 hours. Now nobody in their right mind would start a game under those circumstances, but I had an idea…
I dug into my “adventure ideas” folder and pulled out some notes for something that I hadn’t used in my SeedComp game The King’s Ball. It involved an organ grinder and his monkey. All I had to do was work out exactly what the puzzle was and build a story around it. The interaction with the monkey should be enough to satisfy the comp’s theme.
And so, I worked through the night until the sun came up. 6.5 hours later, I had a cute little game with one or two puzzles, a number of NPCs and some interesting background shenanigans that most players probably won’t even notice. Needless to say, I didn’t have time to test it, so it may have bugs.
I got it submitted on time, then spent the next day or two working on the cover art, game page and online version. (I spent more time on this than the game itself.)
Where to play/download
If you’ve got 5 or 10 minutes to spare, give it a try (I think it’s fairly easy) and let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for a post-comp release. You can play it online at The Organ Grinder’s Monkey or download the z5 file to play in your favourite Z-code interpreter.
While you’re there, play and rate the other entries, as well. There are only 7 of them and they all look pretty interesting.
