Whack-a-Monkey

Tap the monkeys as they peek out of the bushes, leave the other jungle animals alone. A Caputchin first-party game, written clean-room in framework-free TypeScript and rendered on a 2D canvas so the play field is opaque to DOM scrapers.

How it plays

Animals pop up from a fixed 3x3 grid of holes set into a jungle canopy. Most are monkeys (the targets); some are decoys (a frog, parrot, snake, or sloth) that you must leave alone. Each pop-up springs up, stays visible for a short window, then ducks back down. Tap a monkey while it is up to whack it; tap a decoy, and you are docked points and lose 2 seconds off the clock.

You pass by whacking the configured goal number of monkeys before the timer runs out. Clear that goal and the round reports success and lights a Verified badge; let the clock hit zero first and the round ends with a Try again screen. Difficulty climbs across three internal levels as you progress: pop-ups get shorter, spawn faster, and decoys grow more common (up to a fair cap), so the later monkeys are harder to catch than the first.

Scoring rewards clean, fast aim: each monkey is worth a base score plus a timing bonus for tapping it quickly after it emerges. A wrong tap on a decoy subtracts points and time. The header can show the monkeys-whacked goal counter and the current level (both toggleable). Sound effects (whack / miss / verify) are synthesized at runtime with no audio files, and an in-game mute button (plus a host config) turns them off.

Determinism

The game runs a fixed logical world (800x450) advanced by a fixed logical timestep, never per real frame: the live driver uses a fixed-step accumulator and the server replays the exact same ticks, so the live score equals the replayed score by construction. Which holes pop, when, and whether each is a monkey or a decoy are all driven by the server seed, so every session differs and a memorized run does not transfer to a fresh challenge. This is enforced by the sim tests; do not reintroduce any per-frame coupling.

The look

The look is a skin the site picks (a light-theme jungle and a dark-theme jungle), so it switches with the rest of the site's theming. Both render the same canopy gradient, tinted foliage layers for depth, the animal grid, hit-burst particles, and a decoy-flash overlay; only the palette differs.

Customization

Everything is driven by caputchin.json and resolved by the widget into the game's runtime context:

• Skins: every color is a site-settable preset, the background and canopy gradient, the foliage tints, the hit-particle and decoy-flash colors, and the button and focus-ring colors. Each animal sprite (monkey and the four decoys) can also be overridden with custom art; leave it unset to use the bundled sprite. Ships with light and dark presets.
• Configurations: the pass goal, the level-1 pop-up uptime, the level-1 decoy chance, the round time limit, sound on/off, and whether the goal/level counters show. Ships with default (the default), easy, medium, and hard presets.
• Languages: the header, screens, and screen-reader copy ship in 11 locales (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean), with right-to-left support for Arabic. The widget picks the language from the visitor's locale, and a hardcoded English fallback covers any unresolved string.

Accessibility and support

Mouse- and touch-operable, fully responsive (the canvas reflows to any widget size), with optional sound the site or player can disable and a reduced-motion mode. A polite live region announces the round state (start, whack, wrong tap, level up, verified, round over) to screen readers in the visitor's language. The core challenge is still a real-time tap-and-reflex task, so it is not screen-reader solvable; pair it with an accessible alternative challenge where that matters.

Add it to your site

Whack-a-Monkey embeds with a single element and runs sandboxed behind a Caputchin verification check, the same as every game in the pack. Preview it live and copy its embed snippet from the Caputchin marketplace.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The animal and foliage sprites are from Kenney (Creative Commons Zero, public domain); see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.