Judging the first DEV Web Game Challenge

I was asked to judge the entries submitted to the very first Web Game Challenge organized by the DEV team in September, with the results being published at the beginning of October.

We have been organizing challenges (mini-hackathons) on DEV for a few months now, and are planning to announce our first web game challenge. Given your expertise and involvement with both the gaming community and dev.to, we were wondering if you’d be interested in being a guest judge.

Who could say “no” to that? The Web Game Challenge had two “prompts” to chose from: Build a Web Game and One Byte Explainer. The first revolved around building an actual web game following the Aliens theme, while the second asked participants to explain any given concept in 256 characters or less.

The Challenge received a lot of submissions - between September 18th and 29th almost 50 games and almost 40 explainers were sent. It was difficult to pick a single winner in both, even with a shortlist of 5–10 entries. Ultimately I went for:

• Best Web Game : Alien Waves by Justin Young
• Best Explainer : Event Listeners by Hikolakita

You can read my reasoning behind picking those in the DEV announcement blog post published on October 1st. I also liked two more games that were close to the first spot, Galactic Breach for the Twister-like gameplay which was really fun to play and SpaceType Continuum for utilizing an engaging typing mechanism.

Winners got DEV++ memberships, gifts, and exclusive winner badges, while all the other participants received completion badges. I’m really happy I was involved, and I hope more web game challenges will be organized on the DEV platform in the future!