While you’re heads down contributing to your favorite repositories, GitHub is busy finding projects and people that share your interests. That way, when you decide to come up for air, you can easily glance at what the world’s largest software community has to offer.

GitHub already collects repositories for you based on projects you contribute to, star, and visit. To go deeper, we recently attached a simple “Star” button to every GitHub Topic. This offers you the option to plainly indicate which topics matter most, so we can fetch the code and developers that share your interests.

With this release, you’ll see your starred topics displayed on GitHub Explore, along with a fresh set of related repositories. The topics you star will also be displayed alongside your starred repositories in your profile’s “Stars” tab.

You can star a topic nearly anywhere you encounter one, including search results, individual topic pages, and the Explore, Topics, and Stars pages on GitHub.

Starring topics is a straightforward way for you to tell us what you want to see, so we can help keep you organized and connected to the stuff you care about most. Now we can start displaying more types of content within each topic, like related developers and events. And as you begin to tell us about which topics you’re interested in, we can start looking for patterns that’ll help us surface even more cool ideas for you.

Topics have been a community-driven GitHub feature since they were released two years ago. So far, developers have created more than 400,000 topics to build subject-based relationships between repositories. And the GitHub community started curating the descriptions, related links, and images for topics last fall.

Starting today, topics are related to you—not just your repositories. Needless to say, we’re thrilled to see what kind of GitHub gold we can help you discover.

Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering. We’re excited about these updates to our Free and Enterprise offerings:

• GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. Many developers want to use private repos to apply for a job, work on a side project, or try something out in private before releasing it publicly. Starting today, those scenarios, and many more, are possible on GitHub at no cost. Public repositories are still free (of course—no changes there) and include unlimited collaborators.

• GitHub Enterprise is the new unified product for Enterprise Cloud (formerly GitHub Business Cloud) and Enterprise Server (formerly GitHub Enterprise). Organizations that want the flexibility to use GitHub in a cloud or self-hosted configuration can now access both at one per-seat price. And with GitHub Connect, these products can be securely linked, providing a hybrid option so developers can work seamlessly across both environments.

Learn more

GitHub Pro (formerly GitHub Developer) and GitHub Team are also available for developers and teams who need professional coding and collaboration features. And of course, open source contributors will still have everything they need to collaborate on public repositories, including our free version of GitHub Team.

Whether you’re a student about to write your first line of code, an enterprise leader with teams around the world, or an open source maintainer, we want GitHub to be the best place for you to code, collaborate, and connect with the global community of developers. Today’s changes are a big investment in the future of GitHub, and we’re excited to see what you build in 2019.

The GitHub Pull Requests extension in VS Code allows you to manage your pull requests directly from your IDE. Over the past months the team has added even more enhancements to pull request functionality. Using the latest version, you can now create pull requests, leave suggested edits as a comment, and view status checks for each pull request.

Create pull requests

To create pull requests in VS Code, hover over the GitHub Pull Requests title and click the + sign. Choose the target branch for the pull request, press enter, and relax—you’ve opened your pull request.

Suggested edits

Provide suggested code edits and leave them as comments with a diff that shows the current code alongside your suggested changes. The suggestions can easily be applied by selecting Apply Patch to commit the new patch of code.

You also have the option to stage all suggested changes when changes have not yet been staged.

Display status checks

Once you create a pull request, status checks will appear in the description. You can now view the progress of each check that was integrated: passing, failing, and in-progress.

Give the latest extension a try

Visit the VS Code Pull Requests Repository to view release notes and download the latest release package. Don’t forget, you can always install or update the latest version directly from inside of VS Code.

Game Off just wrapped up with over 300 games submitted making it our largest event yet! This year’s theme–HYBRID–proved to be both fun and challenging.

Here are the winners as voted on by the game developers themselves. You can also view all of the entries’ ratings on itch.io.

Overall Winner: Singularity

Singularity puts you in control of a robot exploring the planet, where economy and industry have collapsed and humans are facing extinction. The code deep within your neural network urges you forward, but your robotic parts are easily damaged. Destroy and hybridize parts of other robots to repair yourself. The creators Kendall Breivogel, Sean Collins, Alexander Runnels, and Alexandre Thorp want you to try to become the ultimate AI—do you accept this challenge?

► Play (Windows, Linux) · View source (Unreal Engine, C++)

Best Gameplay - MIX UP

MIX UP is a colorful and polished match three puzzle game from @guoboism. If you liked the challenge of 2048, you’ll love this!

► Play (Web, Windows, macOS) · View source (Unity, C#)

Best Graphics - Fire of Kala

Defend your base against the enemy horde in Fire of Kala—a beautiful, unique hybrid platform and tower defense game.

► Play (Web) · View source (Unity, C#)

Best Audio - Home

Home is a delightful game from @sharpfives, where you have to help your hybrid hero find a way off of an abandoned planet. What adventures await your hero? There’s only one way to find out!

► Play (Web) · View source (Phaser, JavaScript)

Innovation - Lens

Point, click, and drag your way to victory in Lens—a unique Window manager meets physics puzzle game from @notexplosive. You’re sure to have a nostalgic time playing this one.

► Play (Windows) · View source (Lua)

Theme Interpretation - Blow the Shark Down

Hybridizing both game characters and genres, Blow the Shark Down is a remarkable turn-based combat game featuring hilariously animated Sharkmen. This gang of beasts will entertain parties of up to four!

Note: At least two controllers required 🎮 🎮

Controls: ↑ ↓ ← → - move · A - hook · B - cross punch · Y - headbutt · X - uppercut · RB - block · BACK - taunt

► Play (Windows) · View source (Unity, C#)

Staff picks

While we can’t list all 330 games, here are a few that kept us entertained.

Editor’s note: Lee actually did try to list all 330 games with screenshots and videos in this blog post!

D-Tac

D-tac is a prototype for a Doom, turn-based tactics game that allows you to load Doom-compatible .wad files. Think Doom meets X-COM in your browser (while using a .wad from Freedoom).

► Play (Web) · View source (three.js, JavaScript)

Did you know? Doom just celebrated its 25th anniversary! Get lost in the original Doom source code, a Doom renderer written in Rust, a handy little Doom editor, or a roguelike version. You also finally have an excuse to play with machine learning and train some bots to play better than you with Arnold or ViZDoom :godmode:

GRIMCURSE

GRIMCURSE is a fast-paced gallery shooter and top-down RPG hybrid. Think Duck Hunt + Pokemon + Time Crisis…hard to imagine? Give it a go and see for yourself.

► Play (Web, Windows, macOS) · View source (Construct)

Three Course Meal

Three Course Meal is a cooking-based rhythm game that will get you in the mood for some festive cooking, baking, and eating.

► Play (Windows) · View source (GameMaker)

Jack of Spades

What happens when you cross an RPG and a card game? Jack of Spades!

► Play (Web) · View source (PICO-8, Lua)

Monster Pong

Monster Pong is a Pong / Breakout hybrid with monsters. Defeat them, steal their body parts, and win the game—it’s that easy.

► Play (Web) · View source (JavaScript)

Machinaria

Manipulate public opinion with Machinaria, a game where you can collect and organize news material to favor one of the candiates in the presidential election.

► Play (Web, Windows, macOS, Linux) · View source (Godot, GDScript)

Lettris

Lettris from @bamsarker is Tetris with letters. Make WORDS and score POINTS!

► Play (Web) · View source (Phaser, JavaScript)

Ouro

Ouro is local multiplayer game combining elements of Pong and Snake. Can you get a high score? Try it out with this classic.

► Play (Web) · View source (Phaser, JavaScript)

Blank Bit

Jump, dash, boost, and erase your way to victory in @pfail’s Blank Bit—a very challenging, but very fun game combining elements of a card and platform game.

► Play (Web) · View source (Unity, C#)

Until next year!

There are lots more to play. Over 300 to be exact! Check them all out on itch.io and let us know your favorites! Share your screenshots, highscores, faux pas, and everything in-between with #GitHubGameOff!

Game Off will be back in 2019! Thank you again, everyone who participated. Thanks for playing. And thanks to itch.io for providing a great platform for indie game developers and jammers! Happy holidays <3

Welcome to the latest edition of Release Radar, where we share the projects popping up on our radar—from world-changing technologies to weekend side projects from this past November. Most importantly, they’re all projects shipped by you.

eDEX-UI i 1.0

Do you ever wish that using your computer was a little less Office Space and a little more Tron? Then eDEX-UI 1.0 was made for you, providing a terminal loaded with movie-inspired graphs, maps, and a touch-screen keyboard.

Learn more from the release notes

HTTPie 1.0

HTTPie is a command-line tool that helps you interact with web servers. It’s like a super-powered curl with colorized output, JSON formatting, and persistent sessions. With its latest release, HTTPie has joined the 1.0 club! This version adds an automatic default color scheme, future-proofing for TLS 1.3, and so much more.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? The Hypertext Transfer Protocol reached 1.0 in 1996.

HTTP Prompt 1.0

HTTP Prompt, an interactive HTTP client, (and companion to HTTP Pie) is also celebrating a 1.0 release. HTTP Prompt helps you explore and debug APIs with autocompletion, OpenAPI specification integration, and automatic cookie handling. With version 1.0, HTTP Prompt adds support for the HTTP CONNECT method, a command to clear the screen, and some bug fixes.

Learn more from the release notes

SVGR 4.0

SVGR is a tool that helps you turn SVGs into React components. The SVGR 4.0 release promises to be “lighter, better, faster, stronger,” all while sporting a new engine and bug fixes.

Take an example SVG and run it through SVGR:

$ npx @svgr/cli --icon --replace-attr-values "#063855=currentColor" icon.svg

import React from 'react'
const SvgComponent = props => (
  <svg width="1em" height="1em" viewBox="0 0 48 1" {...props}>
    <path d="M0 0h48v1H0z" fill="currentColor" fillRule="evenodd" />
  </svg>
)

export default SvgComponent

Learn more from the release notes

svgedit 4.0

SVG-edit is a browser-based SVG drawing tool created with JavaScript to help unleash the inner artist in all of us. And it just reached the 4.0 milestone. In this release, SVG-edit has migrated several APIs from using callbacks to Promises.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? SVG-edit has a nifty live demo so you can get drawing right away.

buku 4.0

Buku is a private, local tool to help you store and manage your bookmarks from the command line. 4.0 must’ve been an auspicious number in November, because Buku 4.0 features new keyboard commands searching and opening bookmarks, enhanced clipboard support (for tools like Screen and tmux), and bug fixes.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? There are more tools in the Buku ecosystem, like a web interface, a browser extension, and more.

Pelican 4.0

Pelican is a static site generator that helps you turn your reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc into HTML you can host most anywhere (including GitHub Pages, if you were so inclined). Pelican had a 4.0 release in November that adds a bunch of new features, such as draft status for pages, new signals for extending Pelican, settings to help translating sites, and much more. And we get it 4.0: you’ve had a big month.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? The distinctive, stretchy skin beneath a pelican’s bill is called a “gular pouch.” The birds use them to catch fish.

Filament 1.0

Filament is a cross-platform physically based rendering engine that can render materials in an impressive and realistic-looking way. Filament has just reached version 1.0. This release adds iOS support, expands the documentation for JavaScript, and fixes bugs.

Learn more from the release notes

Alda 1.0

Sing along if you know the words: ♩ ♬ Alda is a programming language for making music! ♪ ♫ Alda has recently released version 1.0, though it’s no mere humble beginning. Alda is already a capable language that can generate MIDI instrument sounds from source files or through an interactive REPL. You can learn more about the origins of Alda from this blog post by Alda’s creator. :metal: Here’s what the syntax looks like:

(tempo! 90)
(quant! 95)

piano:
  o5 g- > g- g-/f > e- d-4. < b-8 d-2 | c-4 e- d- d- <b-1/>g-

flute:
  r2 g-4 a- b-2. > d-32~ e-16.~8 < b-2 a- g-1

Learn more from the changelog

Kaku 2.0

Kaku streams music from web sources like YouTube, SoundCloud, as well as Vimeo on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Kaku recently released version 2.0, which features improved automatic updates thanks to several internal updates and changes to the project’s build process.

Learn more from the release notes

CMS.js 2.0

CMS.js turns your Markdown-formatted content into a single-page web application that doesn’t require any server-side code. The project is “in the spirit of Jekyll” and plays nicely with static-file hosting, much like GitHub Pages. Version 2.0 adds a host of new features, like tagging, search, and some smart-looking themes.

Learn more from the release notes

That’s just a handful of releases you shipped last month—keep them coming! If you’ve got a release that should be on our radar, send us a note.