We love encouraging hackers to push their skills to new heights. That's why we've decided to help out with the js13kGames competition as the official deployment platform and prize sponsor.
What's js13kgames anyway?
js13kGames is a coding challenge for HTML5 game developers founded by Andrzej Mazur (a game dev himself). The main rule is to keep your file size below 13kB. There's no official theme for entries, so be creative! You'll want to check out the full list of guidelines here.
While the contest is focused on JavaScript we strongly encourage all participants to try Node.js for your back end needs! In case of any problems you can always hang out in the #nodejitsu channel on irc.freenode.net to get some answers.
Prizes
About those prizes...Nodejitsu is giving away one six month Regular plan for free! You'll be able to deploy and manage your apps and games with all the goodness our platform has to offer: WebSockets, CoffeeScript, ImageMagick and libxml support, custom domains, and free SSL on *.nodejitsu.com. Sounds awesome, right?
Our partner - The Node Firm is sponsoring one ticket to the open Node.js training of your choice. If you're not yet familiar with the technology but want to learn from top-notch developers (core contributors and module creators) that's a perfect occassion to do that!
Other prizes include three licenses for Impact.js, the JavaScript game engine created by Dominic Szablewski, a ticket to Bocoup training, two books from O'Reilly media and three copies of Foundation HTML5 Canvas for Games and Entertainment by Rob Hawkes. That makes a great set both for beginners and seasoned developers.
Submitting your game
All entries should be public repositories on Github. In order to participate you need to fill out the form on the js13kGames website with a link to the repository, the app itself (hosted at Nodejitsu), and a few details about yourself.
Deployment to Nodejitsu
Since Nodejitsu is already in public beta, every participant can register for a Developer Sandbox account for free.
After successful registration with jitsu, all you have to do to deploy your application is run the following in your app's top level directory:
jitsu deploy
This will use npm to bundle your application, send it to nodejitsu, and deploy it!
Because jitsu uses npm to bundle your application, dependencies and app configuration are managed through your package.json. You can read more about the package.json format at http://package.json.jit.su. Jitsu will automatically prompt you for a number of required fields as needed, such as your desired application subdomain (ex: myfungame for http://myfungame.jit.su), desired node.js version, and anything else we need. You can read more about how nodejitsu works from our handbook.
Every time you want to deploy a new version of your application, just run jitsu deploy. If you have any problems, just copy and paste all of jitsu's output into a gist and show it to our support team in #nodejitsu on freenode.net.
Good luck!