js13kGames 2024 start and theme announcement!
The thirteenth, anniversary edition of the online js13kGames competition starts… NOW! Build a Web game on a given theme within the next month and fit it into a 13 kilobyte zip package to win lots of cool prizes, eternal fame, and respect!
This year’s theme is… Triskaidekaphobia.
The word means “fear or avoidance of the number 13”. There are plenty of ideas you might follow: escape the cursed 13th floor of an abandoned hotel, play a card game where you have to hit your opponent for 13 points or avoid having 13 cards, break a curse as a black cat while going through 13 trials, avoid 13 ghosts in a haunted mansion, escape a room in 13 minutes or 13 seconds.
You can even make Asteroids clone with “13”s floating around you need to destroy, or Flappy Bird clone avoiding “13”-shaped spikes - it’s up to you! Send your game through the Submit form when it opens a couple of days from now.
Categories
Beside the standard Desktop and Mobile, we have cool hardware prize in the WebXR category along with a bunch of old-school VR cardboards, and four unique challenges in the optional Decentralized category holding a total prize pool of 5200 USDC.
Don’t forget we still have Unfinished category if you end up with incomplete entry (for any reason) you’d still like to show on the compo website.
Partners
As every year, those are the companies that support us, for which we are eternally grateful!
Those are: OP Guild, Avalanche, GitHub, Poki, Arcadia, Thirdweb, OP Games, and Playhop. Plus our own brands, Enclave Games and Gamedev.js.
Prizes
We have more than 30 different types of prizes this year, including 13 types of old-school js13k gadgets given away over the years!
Plus the unique full-print sport t-shirt only available to participants this year.
Experts
The list of famous experts who will give feedback to your entries is impressive as usual.
Kick-off Meetup
Our online Kick-off Meetup will have a different format this year, with me and Michelle Duke from GitHub having a live session at their Twitch channel.
Join us in exactly 19 hours from the time this blog post was published - check out the exact times for your location, and keep in mind it’s later than usual for US, early for Europe, and past noon for Australia, our host this year.
Collaborate, document, share, promote
We’re all in this together and other participants can help you if you return the favor. Collaborate with fellow devs, suggest theme ideas, help fix bugs, or playtest their entries and you will get the same. Join our Slack or Gamedev.js Discord where all the cool folks are!
Document as you go, share your progress using #js13k hashtag on X/Twitter so it will be easier for you to recap what you did and write that Post Mortem of what went good and what could’ve been done better.
Last, but not least: help promote the competition itself, share the good news with your local communities, friends from work, and invite them all to participate! The bigger we are the better for everyone, thank you!
As always - good luck and have fun!
