js13kGames 2019 has started!
Time flies! It’s the eighth edition of the js13kGames online competition for HTML5 game developers launching today at 13:00 CEST, and the theme for this year is: back. You have full month to create a game that will fit in a zip no bigger than 13 kilobytes.
You can interpret the theme however you want - it’s up to you what does back mean to you. Be sure to check our Resources page for useful tools, read post mortems from previous years, try the tutorials, and join our Slack to discuss ideas, ask questions, and get feedback.
Beside the basic three categories: Desktop, Mobile, and Server, we also have WebXR again (but this time with extra Three.js and three Oculus Quests to win), and the brand new addition is Web Monetization.
We’re switching from requiring judges to play all the entries to be able to judge them fairly. Now they became experts focusing on games and giving them more time to offer written feedback of what went well and what could be improved. Each expert will get 20–30 random games to give feedback to, so each game should receive one such feedback from an expert assigned to it.
The list of experts (in no particular order) is impressive: Ewa Mazur, Lee Reilly, Kevin Whinnery, Christer Kaitila, Jupiter Hadley, Spartez Team, Pedro Fortuna, Christof Wegmann, Florian Rival, Tom Greenaway, Abiyasa Suhardi, Joep van Duinen, Pablo Farías Navarro, Björn Ritzl, Ilker Aydin, Ahmed Khalifa, Nathan Lie, Yuriy Dybskiy, Fernando Serrano Garcia, Josh Marinacci, Diego González, and Sébastien Vandenberghe.
Community Awards will then turn into official results thanks to the new voting system called “1vs1 battles” where each time you get two random games to compare and decide which of them have better gameplay, graphics, theme, etc. This should help with unbalanced voting we had in previous years when people voted for only a fraction of games before being able to check all of them.
As every year, there’s a whole lot of cool prizes to win: Coil subscription for 6 months for every participant, 3 × Oculus Quest device, 5 × Build Arcade Games with Phaser 3 course, 13 × Phaser Editor, 13 × GitHub account, 100 × Evil Glitch game, 5 × HTML5 Game Development Mini-Degree, 5 × Full-Stack Web Development Mini-Degree, 3 × Construct 3 license, 10 × PlayCanvas account, 10 × Danger Crew game, 3 × Jscrambler license, 15 × Pyxel Edit license, 3 × CodePen Pro account, 9 × WebStorm license, 5 × AppDrag Cloud CMS Pro/Backend, 1 × Proto.io account, 5 × NodeBB hosting, 5 × CryPixels license, 5 × Making Money with HTML5 ebook, 5 × Kendo UI license, 5 × SitePoint Premium subscription, 5 × Aseprite license, 5 × SpriteStack license, 20 × CSS Battle Pro account, 100 × Glitchbuster game.
This year again top 100 entries will be awarded with unique t-shirts and custom printed bottle openers / fridge magnets, with free worldwide shipping. The WebXR category will get 15 extra t-shirts for the top entries.
It all wouldn’t be possible without the companies that partnered up with the competition: GitHub, Mozilla, Coil, Twilio, eBay Tech, Poki, Spartez, SkyWeaver, Famobi, and Photon, and the support from Jscrambler, Crazy Games, and Y8.
If you’re going to participate, be sure to share your progress using #js13k hashtag on Twitter. If you like the competition, please help me promote it and share the good news with the world - tell your community, post in your group, talk with your work teammates. Every little bit helps, thank you!
Last, but not least - enjoy it! Let’s have some fun together!
