As you might’ve imagined, April was 100% about Gamedev.js Jam 2023. Good news is we’ve finally launched Gamedev.js Shop with cool swag!

Games

Nothing again, very unfortunately.

Writing

Only a few posts about the Jam.

Design

Ewa designed the two Gamedev.js t-shirts - the “Jam” (generic) one and the “Time” (this year’s theme) one. I like them very much and going to order both for myself and Ewa soon.

Events

We had our first W3C Games CG meetup after a long break (and me being selected as a co-chair) - the April one was held with Sandy Aggarwal talking about the activities of their gaming subgroup from the Media and Entertainment SIG.

The first part of the month was spent on Gamedev.js Jam 2023 preparations and then announcements - partners, experts, prizes, challenges. The second part was helping to make the submission process as smooth as possible for all participants.

We ended up with 3493 devs who joined the Jam on Itch and 202 submitted games (last year we had 799 who joined and 91 entries). We’re now in the rating phase - winners will be announced soon!

Talks with potential partners were more difficult than in the previous years, many refused to support the Jam given their overall economic situation, even if they were with us since the very beginning. On the other hand we did have a few that reached on their own and ended up as the Jam partners eventually, so maybe it wasn’t that bad after all.

Other

I’ve finished publishing to a Facebook gallery containing selfies of the js13kGames 2022 t-shirts.

We’ve finally managed to open Gamedev.js Swag Shop - you can visit it directly here. Having it published took us way more than I wanted, but at least it’s out already. We haven’t made millions worth of sales yet, but it was an important item on the “diversification of income” TODO list, and a great test for the bigger (in terms of available designs), upcoming js13kGames Shop.

Plans for the next month

Announcing Gamedev.js Jam 2023 winners, reorganizing Gamedev.js Discord, hopefully doing something with the long overdue Gamedev.js Survey this year, and starting preparations to js13kGames 2023 already.

Two unfinished games and an educational portal are going to haunt me over and over again though.