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Monkey Business

Type your way up the corporate ladder. Build your questionable publishing empire one monkey at a time, upgrade your gear, and squeeze every cent out of your competition. Race friends for bragging rights or grind it out solo, either way, greed looks good on you.

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About the Game

Type your way to the top of New York's most questionable publishing empire.

Monkey Business is an incremental typing game where every press of a key slowly builds an empire. Start with nothing but a typewriter and your wits, then hire an increasingly mischievous workforce of monkeys, upgrade everything in sight, and race your friends to see who really runs this town.

Core gameplay

Sit down at your typewriter and get to work. Typing generates Letters, the currency that powers everything. The faster and more accurately you type, the more you earn, but you don't need to be at the keyboard constantly. Your monkey workforce generates Letters passively, so there's always money coming in.

Progress runs through floors. As you fly up the elevator, each floor has better upgrades and weirder staff.

Hire your workforce

Your offices are staffed by incompetent monkeys. They're not great writers, but they bash keyboards with enthusiasm, and that's what counts. Each monkey generates passive Letters Per Second income and can be upgraded independently. Raise their Mischief Level to boost their score multiplier, or put Letters into direct Letters/s upgrades for more raw output.

Empty level with no unlocked monkeys

Upgrade your typewriter

Every key is upgradeable on its own. If you type E constantly, invest in it. Common letters pay off fast. Rarer keys are cheap early on. Getting the order right is part of figuring the game out.

Upgrading a key on the typewriter

Multiplayer racing

Open the Race a Friend panel and challenge up to 3 other players. Everyone gets the same prompt, types at the same time, and live progress bars show exactly where your opponents are. Create a lobby with a 6-character room code or invite friends through Steam. Wager Letters before the race and winners collect from losers by finish order.

Races have a sabotage system. At random intervals a secret phrase appears in the corner. Type it in time and you knock an opponent back by a chunk of characters, either one target or everyone at once. You type the sabotage phrase alongside your normal race, not instead of it, so there's no easy moment to stop and focus on it.

The library

There are three tabs. Stats shows your LPS history, accuracy, and consistency across sessions with a graph you can toggle between your last 10 runs or daily averages. Building is where you manage monkeys and key upgrades. Practice lets you pick your text source: common words, longer vocabulary, hard mode, Shakespeare (unlocks after 50 total runs), or a gibberish mode that takes a bit of finding.

Graph view in library

TL;DR

  • Typing-driven incremental economy

  • Unlimited floors with scaling rewards

  • Unlimited hireable, individually upgradeable monkeys

  • 28 individually upgradeable keyboard keys

  • 4-player online races via room codes or Steam invites

  • Mid-race sabotage

  • Pre-race wagering with payouts

  • Multiple typing modes

  • Full stat history with LPS graphs (for nerds)