Cozy · puzzle
Rainbow Tiles
Push raw sugar into colour under Master Praline's eye. A tile puzzle that grows into a small deck of tricks.
Unicorn Sugarworld
Five games in thirteen kilobytes
Made for js13kGames 2026 by Jesse Rogers, directing an AI partner. Each game is a single web page smaller than a phone photo. Nothing to install. All five run on a phone.
What js13kGames is
js13kGames is an annual competition, run since 2012 by Andrzej Mazur, where every entry has to fit in 13,312 bytes once it is zipped. The whole game: code, art, sound, everything. There are no downloads and no libraries pulled from the web. The theme is announced on 13 August and the deadline is 13 September. This year's theme was Unicorns and Rainbows.
Thirteen kilobytes is about six pages of plain text. You cannot store pictures or sounds at that size, so every image and every note has to be made by a formula when the page loads. That constraint is the point. It strips away the parts of game-making that stop people from finishing, and leaves the parts that matter.
I am not a coder, a writer, or an artist. I directed these the way a producer directs a film: deciding what each game is, what it should feel like, and whether the result is any good, while an AI partner wrote the code. If that way of working interests you, the post-mortem explains how it went, in plain language, including what did not work.
The story, in order
- Rainbow Tiles: a cozy apprenticeship in a world of dancing unicorns.
- Sugarwind: Athena, who has only one wing, learns to sail the sugar dunes with it, and sails too far.
- Looking Up: she wakes in the web of Anansi, who will tell her the truth if she can get it out of him.
- Unicorn Apocalypse: the truth, seen from the wrong side. You are the thing under the tombs.
- Deathball: she goes down to seal it, with seven flutes and a cage of sticks.
The first two are gentle. The last three get dark. Every game stands alone, but they land harder in order.
Play
Each game links to its js13kGames entry page, where you can play it and leave the developer feedback that decides the results. Playable copies will move here after judging.
Surf · arcade
Sugarwind
One wing, one board, one minute. Catch the gusts, ride the dunes, and do not look at what is following you.
Conversation · negotiation
Looking Up
Anansi never lies, and never tells the whole story. Move his mood, put two of his words together, and ask. You have until dark.
Rhythm · action
Unicorn Apocalypse
You are what killed the unicorns. Ranks of unicorn cavalry charge out of the dark, one blade answers them, and the better you do the less colour is left in the world.
Physics · action
Deathball
Roll a cage of sticks and web through a tomb. Bump seven flutes onto their notches. Crush what gets in the way.
How they were made
A post-mortem on directing five games in a month without writing the code, with a glossary of every technical term you would need to ask for the same things yourself.