Every year, the JS13K Games competition challenges developers to make a game in JavaScript which, when zipped, is no larger than 13kB (13,312 bytes, exactly). Between August 13 and September 13, 160 developers created and entered games in the 2015 competition.
I played them all and the vast majority are decent games and impressive feats of programming. Without looking at the official winners, I’m going to pick 7 of my favorite games from the compo (pared down from an initial list of 44). Each of these games is a bite-sized slice of fine entertainment and skilled coding. All of them are playable in a browser. The theme of the competition was “Reverse”, which is why you’ll see that idea popping up a lot.
You have to run and jump your way to the surface of a collapsing planetoid before it burns up beneath you. Good, now do it again. This is one of those games where you keep running forward until you hit a wall and turn around; you can only control the timing and intensity of your jumps. You can also aim and shoot a blaster to take out the local carnivorous flora or to give yourself a speed boost.
Trapventure is such an elegant little game. It’s a real-time puzzler that introduces a simple premise and expounds upon it over a series of ever more devious levels. Like the many dungeons you’ve no doubt been in before, this one is full of traps and zombies (or whatever they are). There is one type of trap: platforms that pop up out of the floor and fling you into the air and to your death. The twist is that you control the traps. So, you have to use the traps to alternately block and fling the zombies (or whatever), clearing a safe path to the level’s exit. Be sure not to fling yourself, either.
Yes, yes it is. And thank goodness, too, because it’s also raining water and your little island is sinking. You have to let the boxes stack up to make platforms, which you can jump on to avoid the flood. Arrange your stacks with care or the island they’re built upon will tilt. And watch out for falling boxes, lest you be smooshed. But when that does happen, your boxy avatar has some friendly advice for you upon resurrection. This game squeezed a lot of personality into its tiny file size!
At first glance, Dungeon Advisor may appear a bit daunting, but it’s a pretty straightforward management sim with an extremely intuitive interface, so give it a minute. The concept is that you’re in charge of building and stocking a dungeon frequented by adventurers. It’s the reverse of a roguelike, you see? As the titular Advisor, you pick what kind of room to build where, and what monsters to put in it. By doing things like adjusting the entry fee or the price of drinks at an inn, or replacing a certain skeleton in a particular sewer, you can affect the dungeon’s cash flow and hopefully make a profit. My favorite part is the stream of reviews left by adventurers as they leave the dungeon. In addition to being cute, they contain actionable advice about making your dungeon more appealing to adventurers. I haven’t managed to raise my to raise my overall dungeon rating above 2.8 out of 5 stars yet, but I’ll keep trying!
Instead of being the player, you’re the level. But you like the player and you want to keep them alive. The player jumps along and you have to twirl your circle of platforms around so they can land on a tile that matches their current color. Every time they leap into the air, they change their color, making it fairly difficult to keep them from landing on a mismatched color and dying. The concept is immediately graspable, but makes for some hard-to-master gameplay. And hey level, you’re really pretty!
The idea is simple but but executed well; the presentation is just awesome. Cargo-72 is the name of the service droid that you control, going about its mundane task in support of a planetary invasion effort. You roll from point A to point B, climbing and jumping up hills and over rough terrain, while avoiding spots that are deadly to the touch (even for a droid). When you arrive at your destination, you pick up your cargo and reverse direction to haul it back to point A. And as anyone who’s ever driven anything knows, driving the same course in reverse is a lot tougher.
I’m always fond of good Chess spin-offs, but most of them are turn-based affairs. ChessPursuit is an action game that relies on quick thinking and only a cursory knowledge of Chess. As long as you know how the pieces move, you’re fine. You are the King defending the Queen (in a reversal of how it usually is), who has been wounded. You can move a square at a time, in any direction, in real time. You make your way forward along the arc of a scrolling chessboard as rotates towards you, carrying groups of enemy pieces arrayed in different patterns. All you have to do is keep going forward without putting yourself in checkmate or letting a single white piece reach the bottom of the screen. It’s not easy, but it’s quite fun.
Browse the rest of the 2015 entries and give some a try! There are plenty of gems I didn’t cover here. What are your favorites?
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