Becoming a GitHub Star

I’m honored to be listed among the fine folks of the GitHub Stars program, which gathers shining individuals from the world’s largest open source community, though I still think I got mistaken for someone else.

Recognize those who go above and beyond. Lift up the people who inspire and educate your communities with the GitHub Stars program.

This is where my impostor syndrome is kicking in, because I don’t maintain a super-popular open source library used by millions of users worldwide, which sounds like a thing to do when you look at the description of the program.

Especially since I’m the very first person from Poland, where I know dozens of others more worthy of the title.

I guess it must’ve been a combination of a few smaller contributions I did, so let’s list them out!

js13kGames community

The js13kGames competition that runs yearly since 2012 have one important rule (among many others): when you submit a zip with the compressed version of your game, you have to share the source code of your entry in a readable form on GitHub as well. This way people can learn from you by looking at the code you’ve written. This means the js13kGames organization on GitHub contains more than a thousand gamedev projects you can look into!

We also have the Resources page where devs add the tools or resources they use in the competition, some of them were even created specifically for this purpose, like Kontra by Steven K. Lambert, those that evolved from submitted js13k entries like LittleJS by Frank Force or Goodluck by Piesku (Staś Małolepszy and Michał Budzyński), or heavily influenced (and often used in the compo) like ZzFX by Frank Force or ZzFXM by Keith Clark. The recent hit Roadroller by Kang Seonghoon that took 2021 edition by storm, or Lee Reilly’s constant stream of tutorials. Let’s not forget about Maxime Euzière who created hundreds (!) of tiny tools helping you with every possible aspect of building a js13kGames entry. The Resources page also lists Post Mortems - articles written by the game authors where they comment on the lessons learned during the development time.

The js13kGames copetition wouldn’t be where it is now without the help from the community. The whole Server category is still there in the compo only because Csaba Csecskedi and Aurélio A. Heckert took over and helped running it. Csaba also wrote the voting app which we used in the past years. Another valuable addition is the validation bot created by Arthur Brongniart, which automatically validates the entries being submitetd, and returns valuable info if there are any errors.

If I was to guess why I got accepted as a GitHub Star, I’d bet it was because of the js13kGames community: Steven, Frank, Michał, Staś, Keith, Kang, Lee, Maxime, Csaba, Aurélio, Arthur, but also Wil Alvarez, Florent Cailhol, John Kilmister, and many others contributing over the years - I probably forgot to list at least a dozen more (sorry)!

Enclave Games code

There’s also an open source effort coming from Enclave Games, our indie game development studio - there’s even the open.enclavegames.com website listing some of the activities. Those start with the Enclave Phaser Template, which is the code I use to start every new game we are working on.

There’s also the HTML5 Gamedev Starter, although quite old and not updated in a while. I’d also count the sources of our very first released game, Captain Rogers, and a few demos used as a base for tutorials: Monster Wants Candy demo, Cyber Orb, and such.

It’s also worth noting all our games are hosted on GitHub Pages, although given part of our business is selling licenses to portals, they are all located in private repositories.

Individual materials

I’ve created a few tutorials which still seem to be quite popular. Gamedev Canvas workshop is something that can help you learn how to build HTML5 games using the Breakout game as an example, documented on MDN Web Docs as 2D Breakout game using pure JavaScript.

Quack Whack is a WebVR game demo I was using to teach A-Frame at a few workshops, the Gamepad API Content Kit was showcased during a couple of talks I gave, MDN Games 3D was an effort to go through the basics of 3D games on the Web published on MDN Web Docs, and Gamedev Phaser Content Kit contains the tutorial on building a Breakout game using Phaser.

There’s also the js13kPWA app going through the PWA features, which was used as an example in another MDN Web Docs series of articles, the Core PWA guides.

Summary

As you can see there’s plenty of little things, but I’m still surprised they were enough to become a GitHub Star.

Still, I do hope at least a few HTML5 game developers will use some of the materials listed above, and will benefit one way or the other!