Mozilla says "Game On" for web gaming with hackathon launch

Mozilla is hosting a two-day hackathon at its London campus over the weekend as part of its mission to promote the web as "an open gaming platform for the world". The London Game On Game Jam kicks off today (Friday) at 18:30 with an introduction, which will be followed by two days of brainstorming and coding as developers and designers try and come up with new games. For the hackathon, games at this event have to be built to run in modern browsers.

The event is part of the organisation's efforts to promote the web as a gaming platform and has been organised with the creators of the global game development competition, Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam, which has a wider scope than the Mozilla competition, is being run at the end of January. The London event is happening simultaneously with a similar event in New York City. Mozilla is also hoping that people will organise their own game jams and has a resource kit to help aspiring games hosts.

The idea of the hackathons is to get web developers working on their games now, as the deadline for the main Game On competition is 24 February 2013. Submitted games must fit into one of three different categories: hackable games that allow players to "remix" the game mechanics or re-use the code and assets, multi-device games that involve multiple platforms in one over-arching game concept, and web-only games.

The contest rules say that entries will have to be playable prototypes, which means they won't have to be fully polished, but should represent interesting gameplay ideas. The grand prize in the Game On contest is a trip to the Game Developer Conference 2013, along with other goodies.

(fab)