js13kGames 2023 winners announced!
The best entries from the twelfth yearly edition of the js13kGames competition were announced - check out those awesome games and their extremely talented developers for fitting those into 13 kilobyte zip packages each!
Top10
Here are the ten best games in js13kGames 2023:
1. Path to Glory by Rémi Vansteelandt
2. Merlin vs Alfonso by Grav
3. Casual Crusade by Antti Haavikko
4. Tiny Yurts by Burntcustard
5. Upyri by Rob Louie
6. Castle 🏰 Escape (2023) by Xem
7. Super Castle Game by Mark Vasilkov
8. FEAST NIGHT by Almar
9. Knight Dreams by Jani Nykänen
10. Robin of Thirteensley by Chris Subagio
Check them all out - they’re incredible!
Voting
As much as we wanted to launch the brand new website with drafts and step-by-step submit process instead of a single form that we have since the very beginning, we had to revert back to the old site (again) and use last year’s voting app. This didn’t stop us from upgrading the experience a bit - that included, among other things, replies to comments and email notifications.
Categories
This year’s competition was having four distinct categories - here are their respective announcements (on Twitter):
- Desktop (Overall)
- Mobile
- WebXR
- Decentralized
The Server category was discontinued after Heroku closed their free tier and we didn’t come up with a solid replacement, and Web Monetization was paused after Coil shut down, but there’s hope in Interledger Foundation as they might bring the tech back. Those categories listed above don’t include an extra one called Unfinished where you could’ve submitted, well, an unfinished game which wouldn’t be judged.
The total number of entries submitted this year, including all categories, was 163.
Partners
As always, we had awesome support from companies that value what we are doing.
Those are: Poki, OP Games, Game7, GitHub, CrazyGames, Flux, Arcadia, Addicting Games, GS-JJ, Litemint, and Ei8hts.
Prizes and t-shirts
All digital prizes will be emailed to the winners starting early next week. As usual, we will be collecting your addresses as well to prepare and ship the swag (t-shirts and gadgets, including medals) to you when they’re printed, so make sure to not miss it.
There will also be an opportunity to buy some extra if you didn’t manage to end up in top100 or want more for your teammates.
Share, document, and continue
Share the results with fellow devs and your community, maybe some will get inspiration and join us next time? Plus, there are so many great games you can just spend hours playing and not thinking about anything else really.
If you haven’t written and published your Post Mortem yet - please do so! Those blog posts are valuable lessons learned everyone can benefit from. Also, if you feel like it, go ahead and build that post-compo version with all the features the game could have to be even better!
Thanks for joining
Congratulations to every single one who participated, either by submitting a game, judging entries, giving feedback, helping others, or just playing and enjoying the games. Hope to see you next time!
Ps. If you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter (X), Facebook, YouTube, Mastodon, join Slack (or Gamedev.js Discord), buy swag at the Shop, and subscribe to both the js13kNewsletter and Gamedev.js Weekly one.
