JS13K 2023 is (sadly) over. 163 participants around the world spent a month creating amazing web games that could fit in a 13kb zip file. The competition has been run every year since 2012, and I’ve been participating since 2013. It is my yearly excuse to write unmaintainable and unscalable code, which is a nice change from my daytime job.
The theme for the competition was 13th century, hence we saw tons of knights, kings, and armies.
After being judged by all the other participants, my game Path to Glory ranked first in both mobile and desktop categories. In this article I would like to detail some of the ideas, challenges, and tricks that went into making this entry.
For the full details of the implementation, the source code is available on Github.
For a more condensed version, I also documented my progress day after day on this Twitter thread.
Unused logos
Concept
JS13K starts when the theme is revealed. I usually spend a day trying to come up with ideas, picture what my game could be, whether it is achievable within the constraints, and whether it is something I can pull off.