For anyone looking to build a game but not yet settled on an engine I highly suggest giving Phaser a shot. I spent a few hours with the latest version and was pleasantly surprised how far it has come.

Most importantly the documentation and example code are now so robust that most common game components like 2d physics, collision, projectiles, multiplayer can be found here: https://www.phaser.io/examples

I went from knowing nothing about Phaser to a working game in about two weeks for a game jam earlier this year. Really enjoyed working with it.

http://www.lmnopc.com/air-sea-golf/

The jam was "genre shift", where participants were supposed to take an existing game and shift it to another genre. I chose the Atari 2600 classic Air Sea Battle and turned it into a simple golfing game.

I liked the idea of using the 2600 as a starting point so I could worry less about the graphics and more about the physics and gameplay.

It's simple but it works. It's almost much more fun on a phone - the touch screen is more fun than a mouse for this one. :)

That is really fun! It plays very smoothly on my iPhone.

Glad you dig it! :)

It seems like it's just limited on desktop? After dragging a certain amount on a desktop, I can't pull the swing back any further.

Watch the demo at the beginning of the game — you don’t want to click on the ball as your pivot point for the swing — use the upper right part of the window. That’s part of the reason I made the demo — to show the best place to start your swings. :)

You have to start dragging the mouse from higher up the window as far as I can tell.

For Lua, I recommend Love2D. Never enjoyed coding a game so much than in this little bundle of joy. It made my programming better in other languages. (Phaser is great).

Note! The examples link is for Phaser 2. Phaser 2 has good documentation but development stopped about two years ago. Phaser CE (community edition) picked up where Phaser 2 left off and went from 2.6 to 2.11, cleaning things up a bit and adding support for stuff like new event APIs. Meanwhile, the original Phaser developer released Phaser 3 and many revisions (up to 3.14 now), but the documentation isn't organized as well as the Phaser 2 docs yet.

Anyway, it's a good framework but you have to pick a version and there isn't an obvious answer.

Yep the docs for Phaser 3 are super patchy and can be quite frustrating, often you'll find things that look as though they should work but are for v2 and no longer exist. There's a lot of great support in the discord server though

Thanks for that note about the Discord server. I'd run into the same problem with the v3 documentation while participating in a few weekend game jams earlier this year. My decision was that I would simply use Phaser v2 if I were to try another game jam. I'll definitely be considering Phaser 3 again pending a quick look at the Discord server.

I remember the author, Richard Davey, was super helpful on the flixel forums back in the day (the AS3/flash game engine), so I have no doubt that Phaser must be a high quality project!

I want to second LÖVE [1] as an easy way to build games! Some user "adn" has documented almost the whole process using the framework to build his own game (which he released on Steam) on Github [2], so it's fantastic starting point..

I hope this year I'll have some time to participate!

[1] https://love2d.org/

[2] https://github.com/adnzzzzZ/blog/issues/30

I've never attended, but a co-worker of mine attended and made a hex based equivalent of a Sokoban game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban. It was pretty fun to play, I'd probably recommend the game jam based on that alone.

On a somewhat related note, the games from DigiPen's senior projects are often pretty enjoyable: https://games.digipen.edu/. I'd especially recommend Narbacular Drop (predecessor of Portal, the game got the students hired at Valve), and Empyreal Nocturne (a sort of aerial combat game).

I did some work at my previous job building a slot machine game in Phaser 2. I'd never done game dev prior to this but found it really simple to pick up.

From the knowledge I gained in this, I was able to make a simple infinite scrolling game, package it up with cocoon and release it into the iOS and Android stores all within a day from my bed on a Sunday. It wasn't the best game ever but amazing to be able to get something out there so fast (I am a JS dev)

I've not done any game dev since but may use this jam as an excuse to take a stab at Phaser 3

I've used LÖVE a bunch in the past and it's great. Recently, I've been playing with Godot, and it's also wonderful. If you're interested in learning Godot, Ben Tristam's course on Udemy[1] is a great tutorial series. The Godot community is very friendly and helpful on Discord.

[1] https://www.udemy.com/godot/

Do they offer swag or anything like that?

They do a roundup of the most interesting games on the GitHub blog, but no swag to speak of.

Previous years:

- 2017: https://blog.github.com/2017-12-22-game-off-2017-winners/

- 2016: https://blog.github.com/2016-12-13-game-off-iv-highlights/

- 2015: https://blog.github.com/2015-04-21-game-off-iii-everyone-s-a...

- 2013: https://blog.github.com/2013-10-30-github-game-off-ii/