I ' m hesitant to recommend it as a reference it ' s a great game , though , but before he made Papers , Please , Lucas Pope published the source code for his free web game about being a subversive newspaper editor in the same universe , Republia Times link contains source for a number of his gamestrt . I ' m hesitant because it ' s not particularly wellcoded . As someone with a lot of experience , I read through it thinking a lot of ugh , why didn ' t he do this that way . That said , it does teach an important and humbling lesson , which is that as far as ideals go , creating something at all is more important than creating something beautiful or perfect . I ' m sure as he continues to make more stuff his coding practices will improve . Maybe you could take the code and try to improve it in various ways as an exercise in applying those sorts of designs . There ' s another lesson here which is that really elegant fancy design isn ' t really necessary when your scope is small enough and it ' s easy enough to keep plowing on the hard way .