Curvelicious is a fast paced local-multiplayer game that gives the classic snake a fun twist.

Since the popularization of Snake games in Nokia mobile phones in 1998, countless developers have re-implemented that concept. By expanding it and re-imagining it with new concepts, multiplayer gameplay, as well as better graphics and controls, Curvelicious is another such game developed by Filip Strelec.

In Curvelicious, a game built with Phaser, up to 8 players can brawl in the canvas, threading their curves around their opponents. You must try to trap your opponents while you avoid hitting other curves themselves, including yours. The game spawns occasional power ups that players can grab. These are not exactly game breaking – from speeding up or down, changing the thickness of the curve, or clear the whole canvas – but they help keep the game fresh.

The game seems to take strong inspiration from some of the original snake games from the 90s. For example, Achtung, die Kurve! is an 1993 MS-DOS game that works very much the same, but without the power-ups of Curvelicious. That game is also possibly a clone of another 1993 game called Červi.

Regardless of its inspiration, Curvelicious brings a polished, fun experience, with joyful music and smooth graphics and is currently available in Early Access on Steam – try it now!

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In two months from now the sixth edition of Gamedev.js Jam will happen – you’ll have thirteen days between April 13th and 26th 2025 to create a web game on a given theme announced at the start. We’ll have plenty of prizes to win and challenges to pick from.

Join us no matter your skill level – this game jam is a perfect opportunity to create your very first game, or build a prototype for your next commercial hit. Almost two weeks of development time should be more than enough!

I’ll start announcing everything soon, but if your company would like to partner with Gamedev.js Jam 2025 and support our web gamedev community, please get in touch! Recruiting new folks, promoting your own product, inviting devs to your platform, or anything else really – all that is possible, and I’m always happy to answer any questions you might have.

If you haven’t done that already, make sure to join Gamedev.js Jam 2025 on Itch, follow the jam’s account on X / Twitter or Mastodon (or even my personal one on Bluesky), and visit our Discord to talk with fellow devs and even team up if you’d like. Can’t wait to see what y’all will build this year!

The post Countdown to Gamedev.js Jam 2025 and call for partners first appeared on Gamedev.js.

Explore randomly generated alpine tracks in RetroSki – a fast-paced, retro-style 2D skiing game created by Mathieu Hermann.

RetroSki started in January 2024 when I was looking for a game to play with my girlfriend. I quickly realized that finding a game where we could compete fairly on equal terms wasn’t so easy. So, I decided to build one. It was meant to be a small dev project but ended as a full game.

The game itself was built using the Excalibur.js game engine and written in TypeScript, with the backend running on Pocketbase. All the assets, including the characters and environments, were created using Figma and basic shapes.

There are four alpine disciplines available: slalom, giant slalom, super-G, and downhill. You can challenge your friends locally or online, and ultimately climb the leaderboard.

RetroSki is open sourced on GitHub, and there are no pop-ups or forced ads. While remaining free, there is an optional premium membership available which offers creating private servers to race with friends.

The post RetroSki – skill-based 2D retro skiing game first appeared on Gamedev.js.

The GDevelop game engine released version 5.5.220 providing the developers with a powerful 3D physics engine based on Jolt Physics.

The 3D physics engine is powered by Jolt Physics a modern, performant, battle-tested, fully featured 3D physics engine used in AAA games, like Horizon: Forbidden West. The new 3D physics engine is perfect for making FPS, TPS, 3D platformers and in the future 3D racing games or any 3D game.

There are two examples you can try yourself already: 3D platformer and 3D FPS, with more planned to be added soon. The game engine now offers the ability to add physics to 3D objects, and create 3D physics characters.

Popular games created with GDevelop like Bullet Bunny could now be reimagined with the third dimension, so the update opens a lot of possibilities to game developers using this tool.

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Santiago Zapata, known as Slashie, is a videogame developer with an impressive array of games and projects, inlcuding six entires to the one and only js13kGames competition:

Today we are here to focus on Santiago’s latest game, NovaMundi!

NovaMundi, developed by Slashware Interactive, takes strategy gaming in a fresh direction by putting players in control of the indigenous Muisca people rather than colonial invaders. Released on October 13th 2024, this open-world tactical adventure blends survival mechanics, procedural exploration, and real-time combat as players work to unite the Muisca against looming Spanish forces.

Set in the Andean highlands, the game challenges players to manage food, illness, and navigation while contending with hostile wildlife and unpredictable weather. The world is dynamically generated, ensuring each playthrough offers new challenges and discoveries. Towns must be recruited to the cause, and alliances carefully managed to strengthen the resistance. Tactical combat takes inspiration from classics like Age of Empires, but with a personal twist—each warrior is unique, injuries take time to heal, and death is permanent, forcing players to carefully consider every battle.

Beyond strategy, NovaMundi celebrates Muisca culture, incorporating mythology and language into gameplay. Players can explore mystical caves inspired by folklore, gaining blessings and magical artifacts to aid in their mission. The game’s dedication to authenticity, with input from Muisca descendants, ensures a meaningful experience that respects history while delivering engaging gameplay. Players will need to navigate internal conflicts, perform sacred rituals, and make difficult choices that influence the fate of the Muisca people.

For strategy fans seeking something beyond empire-building, NovaMundi offers a rare perspective, deep tactical gameplay, and a rich cultural narrative. You can see for yourself – the game is available now on Steam.

Also, make sure to check out Santiago’s Itch page and his js13kGames collection on Itch.

The post NovaMundi: a unique take on strategy and survival first appeared on Gamedev.js.

New version of the Excalibur.js game engine was released, v0.30, with multiple new features, changes, and even more bugfixes.

This is one of the biggest releases of Excalibur yet! Huge thanks to all the new contributors and everyone that assisted in the Discord.

You can check the release notes on GitHub for details, as the list is quite extensive. There are two new core contributors as well, Matt Jennings and Justin Young (who won the DEV Web Game Challenge with his game Alien Waves).

As for the engine itself, you may remember the Excalibur SpriteFusion plugin, since authors of both tools are on our Discord in #excalibur and #spritefusion channels respectively.

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Mike Kasprzak, the organizer of Ludum Dare, announced recently that all Ludum Dare events planned for 2025 are now cancelled.

That doesn’t mean Ludum Dare is dead, but I wont be running any events this year, nor will I be able to assist with things related to it (not for several months).

He then explains about his struggles to find a full-time job that would cover his life expenses and also allow him to run Ludum Dare at the same time. I was personally struggling with similar thoughts about js13kGames last year, but luckily was able to team up with the fine folks at OP Games to lead OP Guild, which fixes most of the issues.

It seems Ludum Dare community quickly responded with kindness and donations, as only a few days later Mike published another post to stay tuned as maybe not everything is lost. I’m hoping he’ll figure out the best way out of the current situation, no matter if it means continuing or stopping Ludum Dare events in the future.

The post Ludum Dare taking a break… or not? first appeared on Gamedev.js.

Thomas Rinsma decided to abuse PDF field objects to render monochrome grid, and combine it with keystroke-entry in a text field to receive inputs – that’s how playable Tetris in a PDF file was born.

You can read the blog post about the implementation details from the author himself – the display part is quite interesting:

For Tetris, I just created a 10×20 grid of buttons (they can be styled however you want), which can be shown/hidden from JavaScript by setting their .hidden property, creating monochrome pixels.

var pixel_fields = [];
function game_init() {
	// Gather references to pixel field objects
	for (var x = 0; x < 10; ++x) {
		pixel_fields[x] = [];
		for (var y = 0; y < 20; ++y) {
			pixel_fields[x][y] = this.getField(`P_${x}_${y}`);
		}
	}
	// ...
}
function set_pixel(x, y, state) {
	// ...
	pixel_fields[x][20 - 1 - y].hidden = !state;
}

The game itself is called PDFTris, and the sources are available on GitHub. Keep in mind the game works in PDF.js (Firefox) and PDFium (Chromium-based browsers) - other engines were not tested.

Can it run DOOM?

If you can play Tetris in a PDF, then you should also be able to play DOOM, right? Yes, of course! The PDFDOOM is a thing, and the sources are on GitHub as well.

The post PDFTris – play Tetris in a PDF first appeared on Gamedev.js.

A fundraising platform for game developers, Indie.fun, is organizing a game jam with the prize pool of $10k. The Indie.fun Game Jam started February 1st on Itch.io, and you have time until February 21st to submit your entry.

We understand the challenges of funding a game—pitching to VCs, running Kickstarter campaigns, or scraping together resources to keep going. So we built a platform that lets you crowdfund for your game by launching an in-game currency and allowing backers to purchase it ahead of time.

The grand prize winner will get $5000, you can use any web based game engine like Phaser or LittleJS, and Modd.io is encouraged as it has built-in token integration.

The Partners of the Jam are Moddio, Discover Games, OP Games, PixelRealm, Good Game Hunters, and AI Arena / ARC.

The post Indie.fun Game Jam started first appeared on Gamedev.js.

The results of the Gamedev.js Survey 2024 that was conducted last month, at the end of 2024, were finally published! We’ve received a total of 620 filled surveys, which is an all-time record another year in a row.

Your help shaped the questions and answers again, with many being updated and a few new being introduced. We’ve ended up with 40 questions total, and so many individuals spent their time filling such a lenghty form, which is really impressive.

Web game developers still struggle with earning money, as shown in the chart below:

Majority of people (58,2%) are not earning anything out of game development at all, with 17,7% earning less than $1000 a year (both add up to ~75%). The rest of the answers were spread more or less evenly, with $100k+ ending up with only 2,8%.

Surprisingly enough, the overall happiness is even higher than the last year:

It’s great to see 85,3% of all the 607 answers being positive about their happines and answering between 6 and 10, with more than half being at 8-10 range. The happiest are 105 people (17,3%), while the most popular answer was 8 (25,2%), and only 2 people (0,3%) answered with 1 (if you did, please get in touch – we’d like to help!). The sentiment here compared to last year is up by a few percent for the happiest answers (9-10) and the below average ones (3-4) though, both coming from 7 (down from 24,5% to 17,6% this year).

It’s worth exploring all the questions and their answers in the Survey, as it gives a good overview on the Web Game Development community. Popular game engines, technologies, current trends – with the fourth yearly report we can trace the sentiment pretty well already.

Check out the Gamedev.js Survey 2024 page, download the Report in a pdf format, and make sure to dig through the detailed results published on GitHub – there’s a lot of information there, all thanks to the invaluable support from OP Guild, this year’s partner.

Remember that you are free to use any data listed in the report, but please give credit and link to the original source when using it, thank you!

The post Report on the current state of Web Game Development in 2024 is out! first appeared on Gamedev.js.