The second WASM-4 game jam is a wrap and the results are in! Thanks again to all our judges who each took the time to rate all 26 games. Thanks again to Wasmer for sponsoring a prize fund and helping us with promotion.

The quality of many of the games in this jam were absolutely incredible. It was very difficult to rank the top entries, and we even had a 3-way tie for 3rd place! After much deliberation, the judges sorted out the tie to give us our 3rd and 4th place winners. Since it was extremely close with the tie breaker, I'll be pitching in a small bonus prize for our 5th place winner.

Without further ado, here is the final ranking!

Winners#

5th place and $100, Samurai Revenge (wapm link) by Krylan!

4th place and $250, Asteroids 3000 (wapm link) by HitchH1k3r!

3rd place and $500, disk-0 MADNESS (wapm link) by maxcurzi!

2nd place and $750, First Flight (wapm link) by bootra!

1st place and $1000, Journey to Entorus (wapm link) by JerwuQu!

You can see the full rankings and play all 26 games here on itch.io. Also be sure to check out the per-category rankings. There were so many great games in this jam, and they all deserve a playthrough and comment. If you managed to submit a game at all, congratulations! If not, I hope you join us for the next jam!

Also check out all the WASM-4 games on wapm, which now has a new category specifically for WASM-4.

Developer Survey#

As part of the game submission process, we asked developers to fill out a short, optional survey with some basic questions. Since almost everyone took the time to fill out this survey, we have enough data to share some interesting graphs about the average WASM-4 developer.

Programming Language#

We asked developers about the programming language they used to build their jam game:

Zig has really taken over! AssemblyScript also had a strong showing, coming out of nowhere after being almost completely absent from our last jam.

Interests in WASM-4#

We asked developers which aspects of WASM-4 they're interested in:

Unsurprisingly, almost everyone marked the challenge of resource constraints as one of the things they're interested in. A large number are also marked interest in WebAssembly's future as one of their reasons for using WASM-4.

Ages#

We asked developers roughly which of these age buckets they fall into:

I was expecting older folks to be more interested in retro tech aesthetics, so it was surprising to see all the Zoomers! Part of that is likely due to how game jams skew younger in general, but it's interesting how WASM-4 is being picked up by people who may have never been exposed to the Game Boy or NES.

Professions#

We asked developers whether they're a student, retired, working in a software field, or working in a field unrelated to software:

It turns out that building a WASM-4 game is actually kind of technical. The population is skewed among people who already work in software, or are a student (presumably for a software field).

Geography#

Finally, we asked developers where they live:

With these results, I've decided to switch WASM-4's refresh rate to 50 hz (just kidding). In all seriousness, we have major work to do in reaching developers outside of Europe and North America. If you're from a non-English speaking community and reading this, please help us get WASM-4 into more people's hands!

Thanks!#

Thanks everyone involved for participating and helping out with the jam. You are helping to prove that big things can indeed come in small (.wasm) packages. If you want to keep up to date with future events and developments around WASM-4, consider joining our small community of retro-minded WASM-heads.

I'm pleased to announce the second WASM-4 game jam, in partnership with our friends at Wasmer!

As previously, the main goal of the game jam is to have fun and learn new things. That being said, this time around the deal is being sweetened with a $2500 prize pool!

A panel of judges from across the WebAssembly community will rate games along four categories:

• Fun: How much you enjoyed your time playing the game.
• Concept: How interesting or unique the main focus of the game is.
• Polish: How well executed and presented the main focus of the game is.
• Tech: How impressive the game is at a technical level.

The jam will run between August 12 and 21, and you can sign up on itch.io and see more details!

Our first game jam at the beginning of the year was a surprising success, with 138 signups and 44 entries. Despite WASM-4 being brand new, a lot of people turned up from various communities all interested in one thing: building small. Since the first jam, WASM-4 has added a couple features (like online multiplayer). However, the core philosophy of the project is still that when it comes to technology, often less is more. We hope you join our little community, and I can't wait to see what you build!

The latest version of WASM-4 now supports online multiplayer!

Hosting a netplay game is as easy as copy and pasting a link.

1. While playing any cart, press Enter to open the WASM-4 menu.
2. Select "Copy Netplay URL". An invite link (like https://wasm4.org/netplay/#ABCDEF) will be copied to your clipboard for you to send to a friend.
3. When your friend clicks your link, they'll instantly join your game as Player 2. No installation, no account creation, no configuration.

Try it out yourself with these multiplayer games:

Shieldshooter

Marcus Ramse

Lime Volleyball

Bruno Garcia

WLOKU

12Boti

Racer

Claudio Mattera

Some details about how netplay works in WASM-4:

• Fully peer-to-peer using WebRTC data channels.
• Low-latency rollback netcode based on GGPO.
• Works on both desktop and mobile web.
• Supports up to 4 simultaneous players.
• Players can join and leave at any time during gameplay.
• The cart .wasm is automatically transferred to other players when they join. This means you can host your game anywhere, and even netplay games during development running on localhost.
• No new APIs to learn. All WASM-4 games automatically support netplay. You can build online multiplayer games in just a few lines of code!

From the beginning, a goal of WASM-4 has been to unlock powerful technologies like WebAssembly for the average developer. With this release, we hope to extend that to WebRTC. I'm looking forward to seeing what people create!

To learn more, check out the Multiplayer documentation.