GitHub organized a Game Off - or a game competition - back in November. The contest ran for a month and its only limitations were that the game runs in a browser and relate somewhat to forking/cloning/pushing/pulling. And I am here to tell you that no matter what kind of programmer you are, you should take part in such contests!

I am hardly a game developer. I do spend most of my time writing web things in both PHP and JS, and I had not worked on a game in at least 5 years. This sounded like a good opportunity for a little change. It is easy to get stuck in what you do once you do it well, but just like I enjoy playing with other languages every now and then, working on a different product in a familiar language also offers interesting challenges. Game mechanics, canvas rendering and more visual programming are all things that I am not used to work with.

Long story short, I came up with this small simple Split game that I invite you to try out. It was a lot of fun to write, and given the 1 month deadline you do not have time to mess around and let feature creep take over. You have to get things done fast. It is a great exercise both for programming skills and time management/prioritization.

If you are interested in seeing other entries to the contest, there is a full list available but it does contain quite a lot of incomplete and barely playable games. Having gone through most of the list, I can recommend those few games that I enjoyed, mostly because they went out of the beaten path and are trying something new: Echo, Radiance, Mazeoid and Release Cycle.

Mozilla is running a similar contest until February, so there is your chance to get your hands dirty over the Christmas holidays. You have nothing to lose, and building games is both fun and challenging!