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?
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.