Js13kGames Winners – JavaScript games with a file size limit of 13KB | Hacker News Reader

Js13kGames Winners – JavaScript games with a file size limit of 13KB

2017.js13kgames.com

186 pointslee33737 comments

Some of these are really impressive. There have been several surprises where the developer(s) went the extra mile in ways that are surprising. Like in Lossst, when finishing a level, it'll zoom the camera to the next door and back to the worm. It's amazing that someone working within such a tight limit can think, "I know, we'll do this nice zooming thing which has no real relation to game play but will feel nice!"

JS has gotten incredibly concise in recent years. I've noticed it on codefights.com, where a lot of the shortest entries are JavaScript (and very few are Perl, which surprised me, due to Perl's long golfing history). I'm constantly struck by how tightly all the pieces work together these days and how much you can do with so little.

Thanks man! I made this game by (ab)using the power of CSS and CSS3D, and really focused on the player experience, so I'm glad you enjoyed it! If you continue playing, you'll see even more surprises :) Also, here's a making-of: http://xem.github.io/articles#js13k17

Couldn't get past the first level. What am i supposed to do? What's the puzzle? Seemed like a dead end to me, all the doors had numbers greater than my length. How am I supposed to increase my length?

Eat an apple. There's at least one door that you can get through on the first level (at least, there was for me, I dunno if it's randomized).

Yeah sorry, apple-eating is basically the only detail I didn't explain, thinking it was the most normal thing to do when you control a snake :)

1st place Greeble by Ryan 'Rybar' Malm (http://js13kgames.com/games/greeble/index.html)

2nd place LOSSST by Maxime Euziere

3rd place Lost Beacons by Rémi Vansteelandt

4th place The Lost Packets by ElementalSystems

5th place Lost in a Space Odyssey by MarcGuinea

6th place A moment lost in time. by piesku.com

7th place Search of Sounds by Vitalii Liapin

8th place BUNNY LOST! by Eoinmcg

9th place Where is Winston by Gheja_

10th place You Are Lost by Rebecca

11th place A Day In The Life by Mattia Fortunati

12th place Blackbox: Lost Particles by Adam Jakubowski

13th place Trapped in the Hyperdimensional Maze by Benjamin Hanken

14th place LOST AND ANGRY by Jesús Olmos

15th place Mauja by Viktor & Pavlo

16th place Lost on Stranger Terra by Csaba Csecskedi

17th place Lost Marbles by Rene Hangstrup Møller

18th place EYESORE! by Alastair Pearce

19th place Just go straight by Pierre Gimond

20th place Neon Dungeon by Attila Horváth

Cached:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170930100010/http://2017.js13k...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Love how 2 - 6 all have lost in their title.

The theme for the competition was "lost" - programmers are perhaps not the most creative at naming things.

Congrats to Greeble for the first place finish. The hold and tap mechanic is awkward at first but once you get more body parts, its a real platformer. Which is qute impressive at 13kB!

Personally, I love seeing old school techniques translated to HTML5 Canvas2D: bitmap fonts, color palette shifting, scanline rasterization, etc.

Uses Sonant-X JS synth lib for sound generation:

https://github.com/nicolas-van/sonant-x

Updated as I play some:

Greeble: Having to press "z" makes me dread keyboard issues (I am on qwertz). Fell into a dead-end pit and quit.

Lossst: Uses ALT for a crucial move, ALT triggers my browser's menu. Got stuck. Quit.

Lost Beacons: Works nicely but the scrolling is jarring and confusing. Would have played more than 2 levels otherwise. Sound would help tremendously in keeping a track of what is happening.

The Lost Packets: My clicks often don't register? Gave up on the second level.

Lost in a Space Odyssey: Cute, fun and interesting. Had lots of fun!

A moment lost in time: Some confusion with cursor capture. Interesting but seems more like art than game. Confusing.

If you liked Lost In a Space Odyssey check out "Lovers in a dangerous spacetime"[1] which it seems to draw inspiration from (similar artstyle and mechanics). It's a really fun and well made co-op game.

1. https://www.gog.com/game/lovers_in_a_dangerous_spacetime

I'm one of the creators of 'A moment lost in time.' Thanks for playing it and for the feedback. Are you on Linux by any chance? I've had some issues with the Pointer Lock API in Firefox on Linux.

"The game broke my workflow"

https://xkcd.com/1172/

They are demos, using experimental browser technology. Why does everyone on this website expect everything to work for them?

It's also a demo of the most glaring game issue: game doesn't work on non USA keyboard.

You are a hacker. Hack the controls to match your keyboard.

13KB --- that's a very odd number and according to the site, was chosen arbitrarily. 16 or 8 would be more usual in the demoscene, where they were traditionally enforced by the limits of the hardware.

There is a related competition with a limit of only 1024 bytes: http://js1k.com/

And here a 140-character competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700698

I just played Lossst and was sure it had been made with WebGL... I couldn't believe my eyes when I realized the author used divs and css transforms for everything. I really had no idea how much can be done with just css3.

Hi! yup, only CSS and emoji. :) if you want to know a bit more, here's a making-of: http://xem.github.io/articles#js13k17

It plays terribly on my 4k resolution laptop in a regular Chrome window (ie not full screen). Played a few of the others and they were fine.

Two friends and I built and submitted _At Journey's End_:

https://github.com/w0hrk/js13k

We used TypeScript along with rollup and uglifyjs and got the zipped artifact just under 13k. The contest was a lot of fun and we learned a bunch along the way. It's a great contest and I'd encourage you to participate next time. Get a friend or two and have fun building a game you enjoy.

Tried the winner in the mobile section on my iPhone. It crashed. Guess I'll have a look at it on my desktop computer so...

yah, sorry, it works best on Chrome (Win10, Mac or Android)

I've been participating in this for a few years (except last year) and it's a lot of fun. It has also taught me that I am really bad at designing things that are fun. I come up with things that I find interesting, but that usually does not translate at all to something other people would find cool or enjoyable. To be honest I don't mind - the participation is fun enough and it encourages me to step away from my main long-term hobby project for a month.

Just did a byte count on a project I'm working on (in JS) that I thought was lightweight...

It doesn't do the main thing it's supposed to do yet, but is already 3kB. The shame!

I loved 15. Mauja cuz I'm addicted to Tiny Wings kind of games.

Would like to see it ported to iPhone and Android for casual gaming.

13 kilobytes is 13,000 bytes, not 13,312 bytes.

1 kB = 1024 bytes, not 1000.

13*1024 = 13,312.

1 kB = 1000 bytes.

You're thinking of the "kibibyte": 1 KiB, 1024 bytes. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

> The interpretation of the older term "kilobyte" to denote 1024 bytes, conflicting with the SI definition of the prefix kilo (1000), is still common.

You can argue about how wrong it is all you want, but 1kb will always be 1024 bytes to me.

The Lost Packets is very addictive!

How to play?

Click on the game-name and then click "Play the game".

e.g The first result in the list is is Greeble:

* http://js13kgames.com/entries/greeble

Play it here:

* http://js13kgames.com/games/greeble/index.html

HN hug of death?

Site seems to be down right now. I am getting the generic Laravel "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." page.

Dead link

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