Fifth year of js13kGames - the 2016 edition

We have 127 success stories this year - that’s the number of entries submitted in 2016. Finishing a game is not an easy task, even more with given constraints of size and time, that’s why I appreciate every single one submitted for the js13kGames competition.

The main purpose of this competition as always is to have fun making games and learn something in the meantime, and from what I saw checking the hashtags and reading post-mortems participants really enjoyed it.

Winners

The winners have been announced: Community Awards, Social Special, and the main, overall js13kGames 2016 Winners - congratulations to all! The fun fact is: the winner, Agar3s, is going to continue working on his winning entry Evil Glitch and publish the post-compo version on Steam Greenlight!

Prizes and swag

There’s a whole lot of prizes to give away, including the whole process of printing and shipping free, custom t-shirts for every participant, worldwide - it will be a lot of work, but in the end totally enjoyable.

Judging and feedback

As a popular request number one - now you can see feedback from the judges on the entry’s page, at the bottom. Please note that the feedback text was optional, so only some of the votes had that filled. If you participated this year, then be sure to thank our great judges personally: Christer Kaitila, Jupiter Hadley, Robert Podgórski, Jason Weathersby, Elle Chen, Pedro Fortuna and Nicola Pacini as they spent their free time checking out your games!

This year the voting was based on new rules - instead of one, master score it was split into various criteria: innovation, fun, theme, gameplay, graphics and technical. It added some level of difficulty to judging, but improved the overall balance of votes, and I hope to post some post-compo stats on which games did the best on those criteria.

Too much at once

When the September 13th is just a few days away I have to focus all my time and energy on the js13kGames competition, because I’m managing everything mostly on my own. Vast majority of entries are submitted on the last day, and I have to manually validate and publish every single one.

This year instead of staying home and focusing on that, I was in Berlin at the Tech Speakers meetup and helping manage the HTML5 games booth at the View Source conference. Oh, and also doing a last-minute, way-too-short-deadline freelance job in the meantime. I barely made it and don’t want to repeat it ever again.

Legendary “new backend”

There were issues having new backend for the compo, again. When after another developer decided to quit after a few good months of working on it, before the next edition Wil and John jumped in, offered help, and started working on a new Node.js platform on GitHub. It was too late to use it this year, but Alkor (author of the original PHP backend) appeared after a while, so we were able to work on expanding the current platform, and preparing the improved one on a better hosting. I failed miserably because of having too much things to manage (see the previous paragraph), so we haven’t swapped for the fresh build after the voting ended because it needed some work from my side too.

There’s plenty of time before the next edition starts, so let’s immediately begin the next round of trial and error, and see what will happen this time.

Donate

If you enjoyed the competition and would like to see it next years, you can help me by sending a donation - thank you so much if you already did!

Stay in touch

Follow the competition accounts on Twitter and Facebook, there’s also a brand new Instagram account to look at, and join our Slack channel for discussion.

Congratulations to all once again - thank you for being such an awesome, helpful community! Keep up the great work, and hope to see you next year!