DEV Community: js13kGames

js13kGames 2026 submit form is now open

Andrzej Mazur — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:30:48 +0000

The submit form for js13kGames 2026 is live. Register a draft now to lock in the name for your game - everything else can be filled in later, up until the deadline on September 13th.

No surprises this year: you’ll be going through the very same multistep flow that replaced the old one-page form in 2024. Register a draft, claim a unique name for your game, upload a build and try it out live on the website, fill in the rest of the details, bring your teammates on board, and hit submit whenever you feel ready.

Yes, it means a couple of extra clicks compared to the single form we had used from 2012 all the way to 2023. It has been worth it though - ever since the switch, the number of “please fix this one thing for me” messages arriving after the deadline has dropped dramatically.

As long as the draft is still open you can keep tweaking anything about the entry: the description (Markdown works, and so does a bit of HTML), screenshots, author details, or a video of the gameplay. Our Hello World example shows you what the end result looks like.

Submission flow improvements

Each time you submit a zip, your game will now undergo a basic in-browser test routine which won’t let you through to the next step if, for example, there are any console errors (e.g. due to missing assets).

We will also automatically generate some cover / thumbnail images for you based on a simple screenshot of your game running (immediately after it loads) - at least until you complete the Presentation step.

We use Chromium for the tests, but they run in an environment with shared and constrained resources, so heavily compressed games (e.g. Roadroller) can take a few good seconds to actually process. If you have a very heavy, CPU-intensive algorithm running before page load (e.g. procedural generation of assets), it’s entirely possible that you might get cut off due to resource constraints. This is an experimental feature for now, so if you have issues, get in touch.

There are a few additional minor UX improvements as well: for example, we prefill the “team” step with contributors to the repository you provided in the registration step.

Strict deadline and fixes

Since you can play your entry on the competition website (which doubles as the voting app) at any point before September 13th, 13:00 CEST , there’s really no reason left for a broken build. That said, as proposed in the Deadlines and Fixes blog post, there will be a 24 hour window for minor fixes , though please keep in mind every single one will have to be manually validated and accepted. This approach is in a trial run this year and if it’s going to be abused, then it won’t stay for the next time.

If the form itself is what’s giving you trouble, then please drop us a line and we’ll try to sort it out. Good luck and have fun!

The js13kGames 2026 competition has started!

Andrzej Mazur — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:45:57 +0000

The fifteenth annual online js13kGames competition starts… NOW! Build a web game following the given theme within the next month and fit it into a 13KB zip package to win lots of cool prizes and respect from fellow developers!

This year’s theme is apocaly... nope, not this time. This time the theme is Unicorns and Rainbows!

Not the usual death, destruction, bad luck , doom and gloom, right? I mean, you can still shape this into anything you want, but the starting point is a little bit different this time.

It all started last year when Xem mentioned fun as a factor when judging entries.

I immediately knew it’s going to be a theme for 2026. Of course, you can interpret this however you like, have unicorns as main characters, rainbows in the background, make the game kid friendly, or create the evil unicorns wreaking havoc and bringing the apocalypse to the world. All up to you - as usual, unleash your creativity!

The Submit form will open in a few days, so for now focus on brainstorming the ideas and the first working prototype. After all, you have a whole month to build the game.

Partners

The support from the companies listed below is key to being able to run this compo.

Those are:

Platinum: Wavedash
Gold: GitHub, Poki
Silver: OP Guild, Berrry
Bronze: Enclave Games, Gamedev.js

Prizes

We have more than 20 different types of prizes in 2026 - plenty of cool things to win.

The exact design of our traditional t-shirt for top 100 participants and this year’s gadget will be revealed in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Experts

Our awesome experts will be providing valuable feedback to your entries. They will carefully play through the games assigned to them and write their advice.

We try to have at least one expert feedback per entry, given how many entries we receive each year and how limited the time of our experts is. That said, you do get dozens of comments from fellow devs, who know how difficult it might be to create a good game within the size limitation, so we hope that will be more than enough.

Support

Collaborate, document, share, promote. We’re all in this together and other participants can help you if you help them as well. Collaborate with fellow developers, suggest theme ideas, help fix bugs, or playtest their entries and you will get the same in return. Join our Slack or Gamedev.js’ Discord server with the #js13kGames channel where you can find other participants.

Document as you go, share your progress using #js13k hashtag on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky, so it will be easier for you to recap what you did and write the Post Mortem of what went good and what could’ve been done better.

And most importantly: help promote the competition , share the info with your local communities, friends from work, and invite them all to participate! The bigger we are the better for everyone, thank you so much for all your efforts!

That’s it - good luck and have fun!

Countdown to js13kGames 2026

Andrzej Mazur — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today is June 13th, so we’re kicking off the usual countdown and begin the announcements leading to the start of the fifteenth yearly edition of the js13kGames competition two months from now. Expect partners, experts, and prizes being published on the website and announced via our social media in the coming days.

The same call to action is up again: please help promote our competition to as many folks as possible, so we can grow as a community. Do reach out if you know your company has a sponsorship budget, or would like to offer a prize - all the support we can get will be highly appreciated!

All the updates will be announced on our X, Facebook, shared on Slack, and Discord, so do follow or join those if you don't want to miss anything.

Ps. The js13kGames 2025 selfies gallery on Facebook is still open - you can share your pictures to appear in the collection and be part of this lovely tradition if you received your swag from participating last year.

js13kGames 2025 t-shirts shipped

Andrzej Mazur — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:57:33 +0000

It seems having issues with the shipping is our yearly tradition, but I didn’t expect politics to come in and mess with the process. That’s exactly what happened this time, beside a few absolutely relevant problems we also encountered along the way.

Let’s start with the good news: the packages containing the t-shirts, long awaited 3D printed dice, and our usual stickers were shipped! Some of you close to Poland might start receiving them next week already.

The bad news? Our Polish National Postal Service decided to not only increase the shipping costs (again) by 50% (this time), but what’s more, all the folks living in United States of America will have to wait for their stuff a bit more. Why? Because Polish Post halted shipping to US indefinitely and blamed it on Trump’s tariffs. I can ship the package around Europe, to Australia, or Mongolia, but not US anymore. Oh, and apparently Colombia as well, but they didn’t even care to tell me why in this particular case.

The single vendor that still ships things to United States from here is FedEx, which costs multiple times more than the Polish Post, about $60-$120 per package, depending on its details. And that’s for the smallest one, with a single t-shirt, via the economy service.

I thought I’m either not going to ship the promised swag (27 packages) at all, or (more likely) go bankrupt. Luckily enough, our very own Ben Allfree stepped in and saved the day. A box full of (already prepared) packages with t-shirts was shipped to him in Nevada, and when Ben receives them, he will then send every single package individually to each of you via the local postal service.

Hopefully you’ll get your swag soon, but I’m seriously considering ending the t-shirt shipments going forward given how time consuming and costly it all became. I know it’s our tradition sice day one in 2012, but it’s really difficult to keep covering all the increasing costs.

Anyway, if you do receive your t-shirt please share a selfie! You can either send it to us directly via email, drop in Slack or Discord, mention the @js13kGames account or use the #js13k hashtag on social media so we can see it and add to our Facebook gallery. Seeing our design all around the world means so much to us, thank you!

T-shirts galore: two originals for $13

Andrzej Mazur — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:25:36 +0000

If your entry ended up in the overall top100 results, then you’ve received an email today containing all the details about this year’s t-shirts and how to claim them, plus an offer to grab the limited amount of original t-shirts from previous years.

Two times more originals

Last year’s deal celebrating 13th edtion of the competition was quite popular, so many original t-shirts found their new homes, but we still have a few left. Now instead of being able to buy one for $13 each, you can buy TWO for $13 total!

Those are the actual original t-shirts printed in the given year, and will never be back in such a form, so make sure to grab a piece of history if yours worn out or you missed a year.

Same as last time: you can reserve yours by commenting a specific size from a given year and wiring the funds via PayPal. If it adds up to a package we’re already preparing (2025 being given for free as a prize or bought), then it will be added to that package and the shipping costs won’t increase.

Retro still in the Shop

The Retro 2024 t-shirt we’ve introduced in the Shop to not miss a design, since the one-time full-print that last year’s winners received was totally unique, is still there.

You can buy Retro t-shirt for $23.49. Keep in mind those are printed and shipped by Spreadshirt directly.

Help keep it going

If you do like the designs please buy the t-shirts and support the competition that started thirteen years ago, all the way back in 2012! Alternatively you can donate via PayPal or reach out if you prefer different ways like a bank transfer, thank you so much for all the support!

js13kGames 2025 criteria rankings

Andrzej Mazur — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:49:04 +0000

The js13kGames 2025 winners have been announced a few days ago already, including all the category rankings. Let’s see the specific criteria that comprise the overall results. Plus some extra rankings about the voters in our community.

Criteria

We had six different criteria each entry was judged on: Theme, Innovation, Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, and Controls. Balancing them all was key to end up high in the overall results and win cool prizes in the process.

Let’s look at the best games in all the criteria, as there are prizes assigned specifically to all those rankings:

Top 5 Theme: Phaser Professional license for 12 months
Top 5 Innovation: Kenney Asset Pack with Game Assets All-in-1 and Asset Forge Deluxe
Top 10 Gameplay: Vampire Survivors bundled with all DLCs
Top 10 Graphics: Pyxel Edit pixel art editor
Top 5 Audio: Jsfxr Pro Solo lifetime license
Top 5 Controls: How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself ebook

We’ve extended the Gameplay and Graphics ranking this year simply because we had 10 prizes to give away compared to the regular 5 in all the other criteria.

Top 5 Theme

CLAWSTRIKE by Rémi Vansteelandt (4.24)
Whiskers Witch Adventure by Rob Louie (4.05)
Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al (4.00)
Alley Kitty by Gabor Héja (4.00)
Dinner for Two by Feenposhleen (4.00)

Top 5 Innovation

Wash the cat by Homer Dilpleu (4.03)
I got up on the wrong foot by xem (3.94)
Black Cat Detective Agency by Sarah Hubschman (3.90)
Kuro Neko Market by Federico Tibaldo (3.85)
Triska the Ninja Cat by John Edvard (3.84)

Top 10 Gameplay

Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al (4.37)
CLAWSTRIKE by Rémi Vansteelandt (4.37)
Black Cat Squadron by Jesper Rasmussen (4.19)
Triska the Ninja Cat by John Edvard (4.16)
Non-Mewtonian Cat by Mohammed Saud (4.14)
Witchcat by Jonathan Vallet and Lylouf (4.06)
Gravity Cat by Jani Nykänen (4.00)
Roni and Kira by Jorge Rubiano (3.87)
Echoes of Nyx by Corentin Pillet (3.82)
Kittens United by Almut Kieffer-Jones (3.78)

Top 10 Graphics

CLAWSTRIKE by Rémi Vansteelandt (4.56)
Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al (4.55)
Black Cat on Cybertower by mooookar (4.53)
Witchcat by Jonathan Vallet and Lylouf (4.51)
They took my cat by one grumpy dude (4.45)
Infinite Hunger by Jani Nykänen (4.40)
Catculus by Antti Haavikko (4.33)
Gravity Cat by Jani Nykänen (4.27)
Black Cat - Nine Lives, No Mercy by Cliff Earl (4.26)
Ashes of Ulthar by Elliot Nelson (4.26)

Top 5 Audio

CLAWSTRIKE by Rémi Vansteelandt (4.22)
Black Cat Squadron by Jesper Rasmussen (4.19)
Catculus by Antti Haavikko (4.17)
Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al (4.16)
They took my cat by one grumpy dude (4.10)

Top 5 Controls

Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al (4.45)
Non-Mewtonian Cat by Mohammed Saud (4.23)
Triska the Ninja Cat by John Edvard (4.07)
Catculus by Antti Haavikko (4.00)
Gravity Cat by Jani Nykänen (4.00)

Community stats

Since the refined voting process provides us with more insights than before, we’ve decided to use this opportunity to thank some of the most active members of our community for their efforts in providing constructive feedback to their fellows. Their prize? Eternal gratitude from our whole community!*

Top voters (by ratings)

xem (179 ratings)
Jasper Renow-Clarke (178 ratings)
Dmytro Kozhukhar (175 ratings)
Anthony Cosgrave (175 ratings)
Cliff Earl (175 ratings)
Michael M. (175 ratings)
smhaaker (140 ratings)
Andy Sommerville (129 ratings)
Jani Nykänen (118 ratings)
Rob Louie (113 ratings)

Top voters (by comments)

Jasper Renow-Clarke (188 comments)
xem (178 comments)
Anthony Cosgrave (138 comments)
Elias Ku (113 comments)
smhaaker (110 comments)
Jonathan Vallet (97 comments)
Andy Sommerville (89 comments)
Christoph Schansky (83 comments)
Attila Horváth (77 comments)
João Lopes (70 comments)

Rating the ratings

We’re planning to publish a post-mortem post about recent changes to the voting process and their influence on it, so make sure to keep an eye on our blog in the coming days.

* But we are discussing how to better reward feedback.

js13kGames 2025 winners announced!

Andrzej Mazur — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:19:33 +0000

Here are the winners of the fourteenth yearly edition of the js13kGames competition! Congratulations to all authors of the 197 entries submitted this year.

Top 13 Overall

The list of the thirteen best overall games in js13kGames 2025:

CLAWSTRIKE by Rémi Vansteelandt
Cat Survivors by Elias Ku and Alexandra Al
Witchcat by Jonathan Vallet and Lylouf
Triska the Ninja Cat by John Edvard
Black Cat Squadron by Jesper Rasmussen
Catculus by Antti Haavikko
Non-Mewtonian Cat by Mohammed Saud
Whiskers Witch Adventure by Rob Louie
Kuro Neko Market by Federico Tibaldo
Ashes of Ulthar by Elliot Nelson
Echoes of Nyx by Corentin Pillet
Celestial Paws by Daniel Cohen
Kittens United by Almut Kieffer-Jones

Awesome entries, make sure to check them all out if you haven’t already!

Partners

Big thanks to our incredible Partners who supported the competition this year!

Those are: OP Guild, GitHub, Cloudflare, Poki, Playhop, and Geodework. Plus our own brands, Enclave Games and Gamedev.js.

T-shirts and gadgets

This year’s swag include the t-shirt with our one and only black cat Badlucky hidden behind the logo, and a pair of dice: red and black.

The packages with those, and some of the usual stickers, will be shipped to the authors of the top100 overall entries worldwide for free.

Next steps

Even though the results are out, you can still do a few more things:

write and publish your Post Mortem, and then submit it to the Resources page
create a YouTube video: trailer, tutorial, or making of, and add it to your entry’s page
work on your post-competition version, Director’s Cut, and add a link to it too

Another option is to continue playing ALL THE GAMES and leave their authors constructive feedback.

Thanks for joining!

That’s it! Congratulations once again to every single one of you who participated by submitting a game, voting on entries, giving feedback, helping others, or just playing the games and hanging out with the rest of the devs. I do hope to see you next time as well!

If you haven’t already, follow us on Twitter (X), Facebook, YouTube, Mastodon, join Slack (or Discord), buy swag at the Shop, and subscribe to both js13kNewsletter and Gamedev.js Weekly.

Also, don’t forget about the other event of ours, Gamedev.js Jam 2026, planned in April next year.

On js13kGames deadlines and fixes

Andrzej Mazur — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 17:02:49 +0000

Some of you might remember a year ago we had a discussion on our Slack channel about the ability to send post-deadline fixes , and debated on the details of what’s allowed and what is not. Given we still had it raised this year again made me realize I didn’t properly solve the issue back then in the first place.

(For TL;DR scroll down to the very bottom of this post.)

History of post-deadline fixes

To do that though I need to explain how it all started. So, before we had the new and shiny submit form with drafts, I was manually validating and accepting all entries submitted through a simple one-page input form. You’ve entered the title, description, some other details, attached your zip and that’s it - the game was submitted to the competition. This, given most folks did that in the last hours, or even worse minutes before the deadline, caused some entries to have bugs. Critical ones preventing games from being played, mostly wrong paths to files. I was usually fixing that myself manually as there was no easy way for participants to fix or resubmit an entry themselves.

Initially the official rule was simple: absolutely no changes past the deadline, after all the voting had to start as soon as possible. At some point though, some devs kindly asked if they can send a new zip with critical fixes, since sometimes it was something a bit more complicated than missing a slash in the url. I knew those developers had good intentions and only wanted to improve something they somehow missed, and it wasn’t a dump of new features disguised as a one line fix, so I started accepting those. Each edition people were sending me updated zips with mostly critical fixes, but also small improvements since I was already accepting a new build, within the first hours after the deadline and still before the voting was starting.

It wasn’t common knowledge as it wasn’t written in the Rules, but it also wasn’t a secret - I was open about it on our Slack. Those who knew, knew, which didn’t seem like an issue at first. After all I didn’t want to stop helping making games the best they could be, and at the same time this was all manual work and I didn’t want all participants to now use the extra hours to work on their entries updating everything they could, as it was exhausting updating the amount of entries I did already while trying to wrap the submissions and start the voting.

Fast forward a few years, and we ended up with a group of folks who knew they can update their games, and newcomers who didn’t have the idea, since this wasn’t in the rules at all. This sparked the discussion about fairness of the ability to update (or not) your entry past the deadline, which is one aspect to what this blog post is going to cover. The other one was: what is actually allowed as a fix.

What is a bugfix?

Given the amount of new requests to update the zip “with just this small fix” increased, it was more and more difficult to verify what actually changed, since it was about unpacking a single minified zip sent via a private message on Slack and uploading it through an FTP. The competition’s website didn’t run the games from a GitHub repo, but a PHP backend made in 2013. It was simpler for me to just accept what was coming, remembering the good intentions of those sending the updated zips.

Fast forward again and we ended up with the vague idea of “yeah, you can send important fixes if you’re nice to Ender in a private message, but remember he’s busy”. The crucial part was the word important. By default it was an update to fix a critical bug preventing the game from being played, but in time it was watered down to anything important to developers that they were able to fix and improve in that few hour window. Of course there was no time to add entirely new features. Plus it was accepted anyway, and people knew about it, so what’s the problem?

Over the years this was a bit of a gray area, but it worked. There were no complaints. This wasn’t formalized to not end up with potentially everyone doing it and adding even more manual work, but I couldn’t simply stop accepting those fixes either as folks could do it for so many years already and there were no complaints so far, so what’s the problem?

Too gray area

The first fact that some people knew they could update their games past the deadline (while some others had no idea it’s even possible) and the second fact that some of those people could submit minor improvements over critical fixes culminated in a big Slack thread a year ago. The critical mass was reached and everything exploded.

Apologies needed

This is the right moment to say that I should’ve written and published this exact blog post a year ago, but I somehow didn’t want to upset some of the people from the community who liked how things worked so far. I also should’ve strongly voiced my opinion about all this (and put it in the Rules!) instead of hoping it will just automagically solve itself. I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings, and so this year we ended up with more people being angry and upset than before, as shockingly the issues didn’t disappear.

I sincerely apologize for the whole situation. I know the next steps I’ve chosen might upset even more people, but I do hope that those who are going to stay will know exactly what to expect from this competition in the future, and that the rules will be transparent and fair to everyone from now on.

Next steps

First, I’ve decided to limit the ability to send post-deadline updates to the first 24 hours. You will be able to fix minor bugs before the voting starts, but you will have to send a Pull Request via GitHub with all the changes being listed in detail, and no new features are allowed. This means you will be allowed to optimize your game’s difficulty, but not add sounds or a new level if they weren’t present in the submitted version.

Second, initially designed to be allowed for 24 hours as well, I’ve decided to allow critical fixes throughout the whole voting period. And by critical fixes I do mean things that break your game: paths are wrong and I can’t play the game on the website at all. An issue with the packer blocked all input and I can’t control the player. Updating the balance, changing the text, adjusting the UI, or adding new features is not a critical fix and won’t be accepted past the first 24 hour window.

Some bugs might slip through and we might still end up with entries that on some specific setups the author didn’t have simply don’t work, that’s why this process is not limited to the first day. Your random seed makes the game unwinnable? That’s quite serious. Game over screen wrongly calculates your total score? Not so much.

This still leaves things open to interpretation, but it’s a much smaller “gray area” than we used to have. I think this year’s few cases clearly showcased what was a critical fix and what wasn’t. The point is to have a deadline, clear rules, and stick to those.

The point is also to finally have this written, and the Rules updated properly. I’ve done that already, and so every single participant from now on will have the exact same chance at participating and fixing potential critical issues.

Given we serve the games from a GitHub repo, it will be done via Pull Requests: you’ll have 24 hours to submit a PR with well documented updates, and I will personally investigate the changes to make sure it’s all ok. Same goes for voting period and submitting critical fixes - I’ll make sure those accepted are only actual critical ones. You will be free to raise a discussion if you won’t be agreeing with the decision, as all will be public. This is to ensure that the whole process is transparent and available to everyone.

Arcade portal with infinite updates

I know some of you wanted to have the ability to update your games for a week, or a month, or even indefinitely, and fix whatever’s broken even if it meant a typo in the game over screen. I do understand the arguments, I’d love to see js13kGames become a games Portal and your portfolio at the same time, where you can showcase the best possible version of your game. We do have Director’s Cut already, but it’s an external link, while it could be an updated game that still fits within the 13 kilobyte size limitation. I really do get that, and I love the idea. Years ago we even had an attempt at a js13kGames Arcade with features popular game portals have.

The thing is: js13kGames is, first and foremost, a competition with a clear deadline. You make a game, submit it, judge other entries, receive feedback, and optionally win something. Then we all celebrate, and move on. This is not a game portal where you can host your constantly updated 13 kilobyte game. Again, as much as I love the idea itself, I’m not sure there’s a good way to have both at the same time.

Also, I don’t want people to feel the extra week or three we’d possibly agree to have as a window for potential fixes big and small is a good approach either. This would effectively change “a month-long competition” to “a month-and-some-more competition”, and then there would be a hard deadline, but after 45 days.

As much as we could have a third link, next to the first with the original vanilla version of what was submitted in the original deadline, and the second being Director’s Cut which is an external link to whatever you can do with your original idea, this would complicate things even more. In the perfect world, and given our competition is so unique, the third link would be version 1.1 (I’d prefer 1.3 or 1.13 though) which you can update on top of the already submitted 1.0 version. This is effectively still extending the deadline though — one day, a week, a month, or a year. We present three different versions of the game over two, all when the Director’s Cut was confusing for some already.

I’m not saying this is impossible and we will never have it, I’m only saying I don’t think this is crucial right now. I’m open to discuss that though.

Unranked as a solution

This brings us to a discussion proposal about the ability to send non-critical updates past the deadline (and the initial 24 hour fix window), but being moved to an Unranked “category”, where your game still receives votes and feedback, but is ultimately not present in the list of winners. Something between the regular entry and Unfinished, which is not judged at all.

Again, I do understand this concept makes sense, as you might have the unstoppable urge to fix your game’s balance or anything else beyond what’s considered “critical” to a point that you can exclude yourself from the overall standings, but you still want people’s feedback. I’m not even sure if that would be easy enough to implement in the current website or not, I like the idea and could imagine having this sometime in the future as a nice addition, but I don’t think we need this right now either.

The rules have to be short and strict: you have 24 hours for any minor fixes, and that’s it. This isn’t a weekend-long hackathon where you choose caffeinated drinks and pizza over sleep, the drafts are there for you to test your game throughout the whole month. Of course mistakes can happen, and if you mess things up bad enough that your game is unplayable, I will help you fix that. You can still update the Director’s Cut version, we might end up with the third link eventually, or morph into a games portal, but so far js13kGames is a competition with a clear deadline. You make sure to submit the best possible version of the game you are capable of creating, and then that’s it - the voting begins. You are locked.

Your feedback is welcomed

I understand I made a strong statement here, and there will be people who disagree. I encourage everyone (those agreeing as well) to leave their feedback in this discussion thread on GitHub with anything that you have a strong opinion about. Why do you think this approach makes sense, or why it doesn’t. Maybe you have a totally different idea you’d like to present? Go ahead! All I’m asking is focusing on facts and constructive criticism - any attempts at derailing the thread and personally attacking anyone will result in permanent bans from the community.

TL;DR

I’ve formalized the fact that participants can submit any minor fixes to their entries within the first 24 hours after the deadline, but this will be manually verified by me personally on a case-by-case basis and you need to document your update. Also, participants will have the whole voting period to submit critical fixes preventing the game from being launched, played, or finished, but only actual critical fixes will be accepted. The Rules were updated accordingly and are in effect for the upcoming editions already, nothing else was added or changed.

Our third js13kGames Community Soundtrack is here already

Andrzej Mazur — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 14:32:19 +0000

Thanks to the efforts of João Lopes we now have the third Community Soundtrack up on Bandcamp already, so you can listen to some fine music from this year’s entries.

It’s the third year João is collecting the tracks, and all three albums are available to be listended for free on a dedicated Bandcamp account:

The best games all have something in common: great soundtracks. But I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that great game soundtracks don’t need big budget philharmonic compositions to be fun experiences. In fact, many fun games have simple tunes created in JavaScript using a myriad of tools, or even programmed by hand directly using the Web Audio API.

Add your music

You can still add music to our album from your own entries if you want to - join our Slack server and visit the #soundtrack channel to drop the tunes and their corresponding image, so João can add it. We already have 7 tracks, but there’s plenty of room for more!

js13kGames 2025 voting is open!

Andrzej Mazur — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 18:38:57 +0000

We’ve wrapped the 14th yearly edition of the js13kGames competition with 197 entries - thank you all so much for making so many tiny web games! Now is the time to start voting and picking the winners!

Voting runs online for three weeks between September 14th and October 4th , with the winners being announced on October 5th. If you submitted your entry this year, you can now judge other people’s games and provide them with a vote. This means playing the games, scoring them with the five star rating based on the criteria: Theme , Innovation , Gameplay , Graphics , Audio , and Controls , plus providing written feedback of what you think went well and what could’ve been improved.

Updated criteria

Keep in mind we’ve updated the voting criteria a bit: Controls are judged separately for Desktop, Mobile, and WebXR now. You won’t be able to give an entry without audio any stars as it will automatically get zero points for that. You can also vote on the games in the Online and Decentralized categories as an addition to the dedicated judges.

Write good feedback

Try to write the feedback in a way you would like to receive it about your own game. Our panel of experts will play your games and provide their feedback too. Plus, anyone can log into the website and leave their comments though, so feel free to encourage friends and coworkers to join as well.

To cast your vote you need to log in with your GitHub account, visit an entry’s page, play it, and then leave your rating along with the written feedback.

Dynamic listing

The order of the games throughout the voting period will change - right now at the top are the ones submitted first to promote sending the games early. In the next few days the order will change to random , and a few days before the deadline it will switch to showing the ones with least votes at the top.

Post Mortems

While you vote on entries, and the memory of your own game is still fresh, you can write a Post Mortem: what was good and went well, what you struggled with when building your entry, and what you are proud of - it’s so valuable to read the inside stories from past years!

js13kGames 2025 voting criteria updated

Andrzej Mazur — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:08:16 +0000

After having this discussed last year, and getting feedback from you in the past few weeks, we’ve decided to update the voting criteria a bit to make the overall scoring more solid.

Desktop / Mobile / WebXR controls will be separate criteria, depending on which categories the game is running in. Rating at least one of them will be required. If someone plays a Desktop + Mobile game but only rates Desktop controls, we take that as meaning “Did not try the game on mobile” and therefore won’t count that vote for the mobile ranking.
Audio will remain a required criterion when it is available in a game - but won’t be available for rating at all when a game has no audio. We currently manually flag games as having / not having audio. It’s possible that we miss some / make mistakes in the process - please report them if you notice any.
Online / Decentralized become new optional rating criteria. This means that while Judges will continue to have higher-weighted votes in those categories, we aim to factor in community votes. In particular, there are no Decentralized challenges this year, so there’s no reason to just let judges decide whether you met their particular challenge.

Our main goal is to improve the whole process and make the results as fair as possible - please share your feedback if you have any, thank you.

Online category with WebSocket relay in js13kGames 2025

Andrzej Mazur — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:35:44 +0000

We’re introducing the Online category in js13kGames 2025 for all of you missing the defunct Server category we had in the past, and with the current approach any instance of a given single player game can now communicate with each other.

Some of you might remember the Server category we had running since 2013, until it had to be shut down in 2022, due to Heroku closing shutting down their free tier that we relied on for hosting.

Now, with Cloudflare joining as our Partners this year , we’ve decided to run a little experiment: allowing any games to exchange messages between players through a dedicated relay server.

Expand your game with multiplayer features or user-generated content. Build on top of a simple WebSocket relay and use it however you feel best augments your game.

Ben Allfree is our expert and judge in this category, so if you have any questions or issues make sure to ping him on our Discord. You might also check out his repository exploring a potential SDK we might use in the future.

You will be able to win some prizes as well: top5 entries will win CosmoPirates game licenses and top13 will end up with Web Maker Pro subscriptions.

Check out the Online category landing page for all the current details: how to use it and what’s allowed. Keep in mind this is an experimental category , so the rules can still change.

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Online category with WebSocket relay in js13kGames 2025