Schrödinger's js13k

The js13kGames competition is my most successful project - I have so many ideas for it to grow in the next couple of years, yet I struggle to run it again and again on the current platform.

The competition is growing in some parts, but massively lagging behind in others. It’s getting bigger and better, but still uses the code that was released more than eight years ago (!). It’s dead and alive at the same time. Quoting Organizing a successful competition that doesn’t scale from January 2018, four editions ago:

The js13kGames competition is still managed by me alone, more or less manually, on the exact same backend created around the year 2013. (…) Since then there was a few (unsuccessful) attempts at trying to write a new backend from scratch, but they failed miserably.

Fast forward to 2021 and I think we’re closer than ever to having the backend this competition deserves. I’m too emotionally attached, so I do hope other folks who are way better than me will help push it further. It’s a long and bumpy ride, but the community over the years was extremely supportive and we somehow made it this far. It will be truly awesome to finally drop the manual work that was taking days or weeks to complete every single year and let the code do the heavy lifting. Fingers crossed!

Edit: I’ve rephrased the contents of the original blog post as the first version was too emotional and pessimistic.