JS13k is a game programming competition that challenges developers to create a web game in less than 13 kilobytes.
2022 was my first year participating. The theme was DEATH. It was so fun!
The Game
Ideas
My favorite games generally involve some element of building and/or planning so I tried to pursue that here.
Before the competition I had a few ideas:
- Engineering game involving building a rocket to get to space - sort of like Kerbal Space Program (KSP) but in 2-D (and obviously much simpler)
- A game where you design a fireworks show get judged on how good it is.
- A game involving forts and missies but you could design the forts and the missies had blast damage modeled by a cellular automata (I mostly just want to code an automata)
I settled on a variation of the first one, but it didn't turn out much like KSP at all.
Roadblocks
I had very little time between work, family, and pre-planned activities, and I was actually job interviewing at the time. But when something is exciting or really matters, you just somehow find the time to do it.
I worked on the game when I could over the next month or so. By the time I got the game to a state I was happy with, I only had a few hours left to do the level design. And these were the 1am and 2am hours of the day, so I was not operating at peak mental efficiency.
Tangent: Sometimes things work out
I also had a poorly scheduled job interview the next morning. Part of the interview was technical in nature and these can be difficult under the best of circumstances. This was a life mistake (js13kgames << job). I prioritized poorly here. Unsurprisingly, I didn't think the interview went that well, I kept getting stuck and felt like I a was given a lot of help. Was bummed afterward, but somehow I still got the job ¯\(ツ)\/¯
I threw together 8 levels and submitted it. The first level is easy. Every level after that seems impossibly difficult (I had only beaten 7 out of the 8).
Even the levels I had ideas for didn't turn out quite how I imagined. For example, the entire purpose of one the the levels was to trick Windows users into pressing the shift key five times quickly to reveal the OS sticky Keys dialog (if you aren't familiar, Sticky keys is a valuable feature for Windows intended for people who have trouble pressing multiple keys at once). 2am me though I was so funny. I had always dreamed of a game that required a lot of tedious work, then at the culmination of the level/game/whatever you need to press the shift key 6 times to win and then as your sure you're about to win, the dialog pops up after the 5th shift key press and all your had work is lost. Why is that funny? I'm not sure. I think it ended up just being annoying for most people... weird.
The next morning I realized something got messed up with one of the buttons:
Uggg... so unprofessional. Oh well.
Post competition
The comments on the game confirmed that the levels got too difficult too quickly. This was the first thing I tried to fix after the competition - better level design. I think it's a lot better, but it might just not be some people's kind of game. My wife gets mad at me whenever she plays it.
The game still requires some keyboard trickery and a pretty light touch that not everybody has. At least now all the levels are for-sure beatable.
Results
I got 49th place out of 151 and a bunch of nice comments on the game itself. I'm pretty happy about that, top 100 games get a js13k games T-shirt, which I had my eye on.
I love that the judges took time to play all the games and produced a ranked list of, not just of the top 10 or so games, but ALL the submitted. This kind of feedback is relatively rare in competitions as far as I've seen. I assume the reason for this is because it's a time consuming thing to do, can be difficult (and might seem pointless) to give negative feedback on something that probably took a fair amount of effort (programming is hard! and somebody has to be last), and to mitigate complaints about the judging (people can't criticize judging that wasn't done). However, I LOVE that they do it this way. It motivates me to participate again, and makes me feel like any extra effort I put in actually mattered which feels good!
Other competitions I've participated in gave me an opposite sort of nihilistic feeling, like I wasted a bunch of my time see Lunar Loo.
I'll definitely consider participating in js13k games again next year.