Running the yarn party command in a terminal

The js13kgames competition is a game jam in which developers build a project with the constraint that their final version must be deployed as a single index.html file under 13kb when zipped. It’s a fun idea, and some amazing projects have come out of it.

I’m planning to build my own game in this year, so ahead of the August 13th start date, I wanted to find a development workflow to help me focus on building the game rather than futzing with tooling. To that end, I created this js13kgames starter project, which uses the Parcel bundler.

This starter project takes advantage of the convenience that Parcel provides (e.g. automatically handling TypeScript files) while also automating the annoying post-processing steps required to inline the JS/CSS assets, zip the file, and confirm the file is under 13,312 bytes. Finally, I wanted this project to work on both macOS and Windows, so the commands needed to be cross-platform.

To that end, I created scripts inside the starter project repo that use a couple libraries to compress the file and display the final file size. These scripts are run via the yarn party command as shown in the GIF above.

If you try this starter, please let me know how it works out for you!