Game On; Notable Entries You Should Play Now!

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I’m amazed to see how far web technology has evolved. The quality of the
execution and innovation in the ideas from these candidates are impressive
regardless which fields they belong to. – Jenova Chen, thatgamecompany

 

As everyone in our stellar panel of judges mentioned, the quality of this year’s entries was extremely high. In this post we are highlighting 12 Notable Entries with the highest scores after the winners; check out these great games!

 

Binary Boy by Data Fidelity

Play across distinct colorful levels to help Binary Boy walk on a line, pass hordes of enemies as well as boss battles by flipping up and down. Play the game

Neptune’s Pride by Iron Helmet Games

Neptune’s Pride is a multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic Conquest! The object of the game is to be the first to capture half of all stars in the galaxy. Diplomacy and trade are your keys to victory but who are your allies and how far can you trust them? Play the game

Conclave by Derek Bruneau & Nick Branstator


Conclave is a tabletop-inspired roleplaying game you can play with your friends, at any pace, from any browser. Conclave has all our favorite aspects of multiplayer roleplaying games: Customizable character archetypes , Party-based cooperative play & Tactical turn-based combat. Play the game

Multipede by Tim Garbos


Multipede is a silly local multiplayer game, where 3 – 50 playerscontrol their individual leg in a huge centipede, trying to make it walk. The controls are simple, so It’s basically a game about yelling at each other to get people to move in the right order. Jump over obstacles, climb polygons and slide down hills. Play the game

Playtin

by Andre Schweighofer, Eberhard Graether, Francois Weber, Nicola Lieser, Hannah Langhagel, Carina Reindl, Manuel Gottstein., Manuel Boesze

Playtin is a web platform for everyone who loves to play microgames and who wishes to create their own. Create your own browser games, no coding skills are required and bring your game ideas to life.

Kartyy by Matthijn Dijkstra & Nils Wiersema

Karty is a virtual card table top game for the web! Built in an effort to create a realtime, multi-device game with latest web technologies Karty players use any large-screen web device (tablet, laptop, TV!) as a central ‘host’ table. Each player can then use their personal device to connect to this ‘table. Play the Game

 

Slugjam by Sam Sharp

SlugJam is the worlds first slug-based musical synthesiser and sequencer. On signing up a player reseives 4 slugs, each with a uniquie harmonig content. Slugs may be ‘molded’, changing the ‘envelope’ of the sound, then arranged into short loops. Users collect points for various activities including submitting songs, having songs are voted on, and even for voting on others songs. Play the game.

 

Sling & Win

Sling&Win is a multiplayer game. The goal is simply to bash in your opponents structure using a slingshot, before they bash in yours. Play against random people or invite your friends. In order to play, you can either choose an existing world or create your own! Play the game.

The Lab by 4lbertoC

“Oh no, the Lab has been hacked! The commands don’t work anymore… damn! It seems that the only way we have to complete the experiment is by using the JavaScript terminal. Can you help us?”. Challenge yourself with the new Game for Coders, the web adventure that can only be solved by writing code! Play the game.

 

Card Stories by Farsides

A multiplayer game that invites you to play with your imagination, write creative stories and guess your friends cards – without letting them find yours. Play the game.

 

Fight Code by Time Home

robots

Code the best robot you can using our JRA(Javascript Robotic API)® and kick everyone’s robot’s asses (not sure if they have those). Play the game.

Germiz by Ezelia


You are a micro organism and your days are numbered. In order to survive you have to duplicate and infect other cells in order to find new strategies to spread.  Play the game.

Hungry for more games? Check the rest of the notable entries on our website.
*We will keep highlighting notable entries throughout the course of the month so if you want us to highlight your game over here, go ahead and ping us at gameon [at] mozilla [dot] com and we ll get right at it.

Judging is now underway! Here is how it works

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TLDR version of this post:
  • The Game On competition judging process is now underway! Our Nomination Panel and Illustrious Judges are now busily evaluating the 165 great games submitted.
  • Winners will be announced around the middle of March.
  • In the mean time: game on! Play around with all these great games.

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We are SO excited to announce that we received 165 amazing entries for this year’s Game On Competition. From Morocco to Russia to Canada, and from first-person shooters to dancing unicorns to mobile-powered zombie attacks, we received an awesome range of diverse games. Together they help push the envelope of the open web as a gaming platform for the world, so we want to offer a huge thank you to everyone who submitted!

 

So what’s next?

Here at Mozilla we want Game On to be fun, fair and  transparent. So here’s how the judging process will work:

1) A Nomination Panel made up of Mozilla community members will eagerly play and evaluate all the submitted games, and then select a short-list of Notable Entries.

2) Our illustrious panel of industry expert Judges will then evaluate those Notable Entries to decide winners in each category – as well as choosing our Grand Champion!

3) Winners will be announced mid March. 

We know you’re all in agony as you await the results, but we want to make sure we spend enough time playing each and every game. So we can fully appreciate your creativity and brilliance!

The Game On Awesomeness Index™

Each entry will be ranked on a 1-5 scale across these five key Measures of Awesomeness:

  • Fun – how fun is it to play? (duh)
  • Technological Achievement – how well does it demonstrate technical mastery in open web technologies?
  • Aesthetics – how good is the visual design and interaction experience?
  • Originality – have we seen this before? How does the game take advantage of the web in new ways?
The entries with the highest  score in each category will emerge as the category winners and runners up, and the highest score overall will be chosen as our  Grand Prize winner. In the event of a tie, our Judges will decide a winner.

 

Stay tuned

Remember: the competition period is now closed, so you cannot make any further updates or tweaks to your games. Once the judging period ends March 8th, feel free to go ahead and make tweaks or updates to your entries just for fun. But not until then.

Winners will be  notified via email next week, and will need to accept their prize before we announce it on our website. So make sure to check your email regularly. We would hate for you to miss your prize! ;)
Best of luck to all our great contestants.  If you have any questions about the judging process or what happens next, please shoot us an email to gameon[at] mozilla [dot] com. Or holler over  at  @mozgames. We are always here to help! Now go play.

Interview with MJ: EA’s Senior Creative Director “At Large”

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A few weeks back we talked with MJ, EA’S Senior Creative Director “At Large” about coming up with game ideas, creative game play, fan art and the future of the web as a gaming platform.

Enjoy this Popcorn version of our chat and look for the bonus item at the end of this post.

Bonus Item: Screenshot and explanation of the D12 Matrix Activity that MJ developed for EA.

” You can think of Matrix D12 like mad libs.  There are three columns and 12 rows.  You roll a 12-sided die three times to get your game (see matrix below)

HSGAHGS

One of the fun tweaks I put in is I’ll allow people the opportunity to re-roll after about five minutes.  Turns out people fall so in love with their ideas so quickly, this is almost never used.

It’s a really fun exercise on the nature of creativity:  Because the “inspiration” is provided by pure random chance, it serves to prove that the real genius of creativity is the work you put in, more so than the initial inspiration.”

Give it a try with your team to build your own mozgame ideas.

 

 

 

 

Mozgames Go To Global Game Jam 2013

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This past week we had the tremendous pleasure to participate in the Global Game Jam that took place in over 320 locations around the world with more than 16K registered participants!

The Global Game Jam, now in it’s 5th year is an extraordinary annual event organized by thousands of volunteers from New Zealand to Hawaii, who are given the task of making a game within 48 hours. Games are inspired by a special theme, which was revealed this year in a video with …. the sound of a beating heart.  It was humbling to see some 3,000 games made over the weekend inspired by this universal theme.

Participants in Global Game Jam can also choose to create their games using what is called a “diversifier”;  an additional creative or technical constraint. We were delighted to present the “May The (Web) Force Be With You” diversifier as well as sponsor local jammers in Warsaw, Toronto, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Austin, LA & Boston to create games for the web.

diversifier

We are still going through the (fun) task of playing all the games that were submitted under our diversifier, but meanwhile we handpicked some terrific games for you to enjoy and even inspire you as you are making your own submissions for Game On.

Vermin Throne by Damian Sommer & Mladin Stambolija in Toronto, Canada

The Vermin Throne is an experimental multiplayer story game for 4 to 10 players, playable in almost any web browser (on phones too!). You play as a rat, trying to kill or shame all your siblings so that you can claim the throne for yourself.
* This game is made with the awesome Twine tool that we recommend you try out if you haven’t yet.

Artichoke <3 Beet by Culim, Ken Snyder, Daniel Perry, Dawn Rivers, Benjamin Taylor & David Allen at the MIT GameLab in Boston, US

An artichoke follows its heart in search of its beet.

Game: </3 by Doug Macdonald, Jim Crawford, Kumar Daryanani, Letisha Kelsey, and Nathan Grayson in San Francisco, US

In this HTML tag-breaking game players must discover common traits and complete several mini-games while attempting to save a failing marriage.

Arrhytmia by Luis Augusto Maciel Cavalheiro, Rodrigo Cândido Gryzinski, Maycon Robert dos Santos and Leonardo de Mattos Lima in Curitiba, Brazil

In this minimalistic arcade game you need to keep the rhythm while the circles stack !

Guinea Pig by Lara Schenck, brbonline and Jim Newsome in Pittsburgh, US

Guide your guinea pig through a cholesterol clogged artery, while weakening and collecting germs to develop a delicious vaccine.

LEGITIMATE BUSINESS SIMULATOR 2013 by Aaron Dron, Daan Nijs, Andy Dirdin and Hazel McKendrick in Glasgow, UK

A hilarious simulation where you start out on the lowest rungs of your family business as you fight to keep hearts beating… and make a cash-grab for vital-organs.

Geometry Saga by John Posey, Chris Goodrich, Darius Hill, Sarah Wilson , Inki Hong, Shaun Chasin, Kathryn Cheng, Meagan Moffat.

A 2D action adventure platforming rpg that involves only simple geometry.

WikiBeat by Paul Gestwicki & JdHurst in Indianapolis

A fun multiplayer Wikipedia Trivia for all you wiki-geeks out there.

Want to play more? You can check all the web games submitted under our diversifier here. Want us to feature your Global Game Jam games?  tweet us a line @mozgames and we will make sure to play and showcase them here. And don’t forget; you only have till the 24th of February to submit your games to  Game On.

A chat with Egor Kuryanovich, Far7′s creator

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Wondering what the previous winners of Game On are doing? This week we were thrilled to chat with Egor Kuryanovich, creator of Far7 who won the Best Technology Award in the 2010 Game On. Check out what he had to say about web games and the competition and make sure to play his game!

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Tell us  a little bit about yourself, how did you start making games? what make you want to participate in the last game on?

My name is Egor Kuryanovich. I am 26 years old. I live in Minsk, Belarus. At the moment, I am the full-time CTO for FAR7. I started my career in the seventh grade by creating a simple quest in Visual Basic. The program was really simple, but it was a game I created on my own and I really enjoyed the process.

We started work on FAR7 in the late summer of 2010. When we heard about the start of GAME_ON contest it was as if we had received a sign that the stack of technology that we had chosen was the right one and held some promise. Winning the Best Technology nomination proved us right. This kind of contests give an opportunity to developers all over the world to get feedback from professionals.

What opportunities do you see for technology and mechanics in using the web a gaming platform?

I am more of a tech kind of guy, and I can say that HTML5 is just stunning. I find it most impressive that players can run their browser-based games on phones and tablets without me having to alter the code. It is now customary to start playing FAR7 on your desktop computer, and then pick up where you left off when you are on the couch with your tablet. Awesome, is it not?

Any advice you have to give to this years’ Game On contestants?

This year’s participants might have more skills and knowledge about game development than we had two years ago. There are a lot of articles and books about open web game development out there. I would recommend everyone to take this opportunity and learn as much as they can from others’ experience.

Get Excited And Make Games! Global Game Jam, Jan 25-27

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Game jam events happening around the world, 63 countries and counting…

Global Game Jam! Make games with other game designers, developers and enthusiasts around the world. The Global Game Jam (#ggj13) is happening the weekend of Jan 25-27, spread across more than 300 locations in 63 countries.

Mozilla’s Game On Competition is sponsoring several of the events. And there’s more Game Jams coming in February, including during Indiecade East, a Bocoup Youth Game Jam in Boston, one at the NYU Games & Innovation Lab, and another jam planned for Kenya.

Enter the Game On Competition — before Feb 24

There are now 39 entries in the Mozilla Game On Competition, from Robocybe to Slime Volley.

You can also check out interviews with our illustrious panel of judges on the Game On blog, including Alice Taylor (Makie.me), Lisa Long (Zombies Run), Daniel Cook (Spry Fox) and a new craffty video for Web-Only Games.

Get involved

* This post was originally blogged by OpenMatt in his blog

Interview: Lisa Long, Six to Start

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Lisa Long is an expert when it comes to games that use the web in unique and fun ways. She is one of our rockstar judges as well as a co-founder at Six to Start, the makers of the smash hit Zombies Run.

In an interview that takes well advantage of the various accessories offered over Google+ Hangouts , Lisa talks about games that utilize components of the web as a core part of their gameplay.

She also shares some words of wisdom about coming up with fun game mechanics and what the judges will be looking for as they play the Game On Entries. Enjoy!

 

It’s January! Make Web-Only Games

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In January it’s all about games that can only be played on the web. Get inspired by web-only mechanics such as sharing links and data, finding clues on the web that will help you advance in the game, always-on multi-player, and more—creating the most webilicious game possible!

Check the crafty video we made below to get started and stay tuned for more interviews on the theme of Web-Only games with our rockstar judges.

 

GitHub Game Off Winners

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We are super proud to be partnering with Github for our competition and we wanted to share with you the great entries from GitHub’s Game Off Competition.

Last month, Github’s @leereily organized a month long game jam asking developers to create a web-based game loosely built around the theme of forking, branching, cloning, pushing, and/or pulling. There were over 1337 forks and almost 200 playable games at the end of the competition. Hope your schedule is clear, there’s a lot of good games to play here!

Winners

Help Hotfix collect stargazers and avoid enemies. Collect commits to upgrade hotfix and add new features » play · source

An abstract racing game where you fight against the clock and the computer to get as far as you can in a product’s life-cycle » play · source

Rock Kickass is a shoot’em up platformer about an android who can merge the code of the enemies he kills to gain their powers » play · source

PolyBranch is a minimalist 3D game. Dodging branches may seem easy at first, but how long can you hold up as you approach terminal velocity? » play · source

An addictive game where you guide little Pappu around obstacles while collecting coins, stars, and berries and avoiding enemies known as Pakias » play · source

Runners Up

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Honorable Mentions

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