Mega Monkey Mayhem
Mega Monkey Mayhem is a fast-paced monkey bomb battle. Scour the battlefield for powerups to improve your monkey’s abilities and arsenal. Attack other players by throwing bombs and catching them with the explosions. Use the terrain to your advantage to strike at enemies below. But watch out for contagious jungle viruses that make your monkey sick!
Mega Monkey Mayhem uses a 3D engine capable of rendering cel-shaded objects to give the game a distinct theme and feel. A few parts of the game were developed as class assignments but most of the work was done on our own so we could enter the game into the IGF 2004 Games Festival Student Showcase.
Team
The team was based out of Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochster, NY, except two members came from other colleges across the country.
Programming / Core Team
- Jason Winnebeck - Team Leader, Programmer
- Jon Hilliker - Programming
- Peter Mowry - Programming and Level Editor
- Geoff Goodwin - GUI frontend
Art Team
- Ben Miller - Modelling Lead, character art and animation
- Chuck Kirk - Level texture artist, HUD artist
- Jay Semerad - Sound and Music Lead, Ann Harbor, MI.
- David Huynh - GUI frontend art, logo art
- Jonathan Wall - Orlando, FL. Sound Design
- Jay Varner - Orlando, FL. Sound Design
- Alex Brazie - Powerup
- Mike Clark - Bomb Models
- Barry Nardone - Homing Bomb Animation
- Jim Clase - Explosion Texture Graphics
Other Credits / Thanks:
- Elizabeth Mihalo was the source for the monkey voices.
- Chad Austin and his team for the great LGPL’d Audiere audio library.
- The installer program is Copyright (C) 1997-2002 Jordan Russell. All rights reserved. http://www.innosetup.com/.
- Thanks for the support and encouragement from our professors at RIT!
- Jessica Bayliss for helping find team members and providing a lab for us.
- Portions of code Winnebeck, Mowry, and Hilliker developed in Andy Phelps’s 2D and 3D DirectX graphics courses was used in the game.
- The skeletal animation system Jason Winnebeck developed for Joe Geigel’s Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques class was used in the game.
- The cel-shader developed by Jason Winnebeck for Nan Schaller’s Computer Graphics 2 class was used in the game.
- The 3D level renderer developed by Jon Hilliker for Andy Phelps’s 3D gaming course was used in the game.
- The Level Editor was developed by Peter Mowry as an assignment for Shreiner’s Introduction to C# and .NET Programming.
- Thanks to the Electronic Gaming Society for hosting the development CVS and files server.
Screenshots
Features
- Cel-shaded characters and bright, colorful stages set a cartoonish theme.
- Focused more on fun and comedy than violence, blood, and gore.
- Fun music soundtrack and sound effects.
- Supports up to 4 players, using a combination of keyboards and up to 4 joysticks.
- A graphical user interface for configuring player controls and key settings.
- The GUI also allows players to change the gameplay, to customize gameplay settings such as monkey speed and bomb fuse time, allowing the player to greatly alter the style of resulting play.
- An install and uninstall feature that allows the game to be completely uninstalled without leaving any clutter on your system.
- A map editor to create your own maps.
Story
Twenty years ago, a starship carrying a load of munitions to the front lines of some long forgotten inter-galactic war, crashed into the quiet planet of Kurtal, scattering its cargo across the great jungle of Gruu’man.
The population of this jungle was mostly a happy race of monkeys until the day of the crash. On that day, the great Monkey King Pomaloopay, well known for his smooth hair and dark teeth, was perusing his jungle when one of the bombs landed upon him, killing him and destroying his favourite tree.
Shortly after, the monkeys began to point fingers and throw doody, as the beach dwellers blamed the jungle monkeys for the incident, who in turn blamed the river monkeys. Soon, the whole jungle was set aflame as the monkeys learned to use the bomb generators that were scattered throughout Gruu’man.
Now, 20 years later, you are one of the mighty monkey warriors, set upon the jungle battlefields to protect your village. Fight for the sake of your neighbors and your children! Fight for your bananas!
Gameplay
How to Play
In Mega Monkey Mayhem, the goal of the game is the total annihilation of your opponents. To do this you have two main weapons: Bombs and Homing Bombs.
Bombs are held by the monkeys, and can be thrown some distance from the monkey. You can increase this distance by holding down the Throw Bomb button longer, until your power bar fills. Bombs can be used to block the path of your opponents. Bombs will only explode for a certain number of tiles in a plus shape. Dynamite powerups increase this range, and bomb bags increase the number of bombs you can have on the board at any given time.
Homing bombs are like bombs, except that they can sense the nearest monkey in front of them and follow him for some time, then if they touch the target, they will explode. Homing bombs are very volatile and will explode on contact with any object, even the player who threw it, and they can sometimes explode when falling off ledges.
If a monkey is hit with a bomb, the bomb will bounce off the monkey and he will be stunned for a few seconds. You can use this time to plant additional bombs to block the monkey.
Teleporters
Some levels feature teleporter devices that fell from the munitions starship as it was crashing. The monkeys never figured out how to use the teleporters, and they were never set properly. So in their current state they only teleport monkeys that step into the teleporter to a nearby location. You can tell a teleporter by the teleporter pad and the blue particles that it generates.
Items
In Mega Monkey Mayhem, there are several items available for the monkeys to collect and exploit.
| Object | Description |
|---|---|
| Bananas | Hit Points - Adds one hit point up to a max of 5 |
| Lightning | Speed - Increases the movement speed of the monkeys |
| Magnet | Homing Bomb - Gives you 1 more homing bomb |
| Dynamite | Blast Radius - Increases the blast radius by 1 |
| Medicine | Power - Increases throwing power |
| Bomb Bag | Max Bombs - Increases the number of bombs that can be dropped |
Viruses
However, there’s a danger to picking up items. You may catch a virus that will reduce your abilities significantly for a short time. These viruses are contagious; you can pass a virus to another player by running into them.
| Virus | Color | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Slow | Green | Makes monkey walk very slowly |
| Chimpstipation | Blue | Monkey can’t place any bombs or homing bombs |
| Monkeyzuma’s Revenge | Yellow | Monkey randomly throws bombs |
| Monkey Pox | Pink | Max throwing power is significantly reduced |
| Slow Bombs | Orange | Bombs have extremely long delays |
| Shrink | Purple | Monkey shrinks and can’t climb stairs, but moves exceptionally fast |
Download
Downloading the game requires that you agree to the license (also shown in the installer). This installer was made for Windows XP systems with DirectX 8.1 and supports resolutions from 640x480x16 and up to 1600x1200x32. It may be possible to run this in a VM – if you are successful, contact me and let me know! The map editor requires .NET framework 1.1 runtime, which was obtainable at the time from Windows Update.
Download Mega Monkey Mayhem (version 1.0, November 11, 2003)
You can also see some details on the implementation in our final report.