Mozilla is partnering with Goo Technologies in a competition for creating games or game scenes using Goo Create and or Goo Engine that run on Firefox 26.

Mozilla has used demo games to show off the capabilities of successive versions of Firefox and Goo Technologies has tools that complement it well. The Goo Engine is a HTML5 and WebGL based graphics engine (a bit like Unity) and Goo Create is its browser-based visual editor.

The contest runs until January 14 and when you register for it you'll receive a starter pack that lets you access and use Goo Create and Go Engine. 

There are three categories in the contest:

• Best Amateur Interactive Game Scene

This is for those with little or no experience of game creation and the challenge is to use only the built in primitives in Goo Create to produce a visually stunning interactive game scene. To provide an idea of what is required Mozilla has posted this video of Jetpack Santa.

Five prizes of $1,000 will be awarded in this category, together with 5 year access to Goo Create Pro worth $2,900.

For those who want to go further and develop a game using the Goo Engine JavaScript API  the two choices are:

• Best Desktop Game
• Best Mobile Game

There will be one prize winner in each of these categories and the winners can choose between $5,000 in cash or a trip for two people to the GDC Conference in San Francisco, scheduled for March 17 – 21, 2014 or to GamesCom in Cologne, August 13-17 (maximum value $10,000). As well as 5 year access to Goo Create Pro the two winners will be entitled to a guest post on the Mozilla Apps blog.

The line up of judges may be enough to encourage devs to join this contest. In addition to Rikard Herlitz, CTO of Goo Technologies, the panel comprises Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and inventor of JavaScript,  Vlad Vukicevic, Mozilla's Engineering Director and inventor of WebGL and judges from Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds.  The judges will be looking for creativity, originality and in the case of the mobile games extra credit will be awarded for cross-platform games that also work on desktop.

I have to admit I'd not come across Goo before - which may be why it is running this contest to attract some new users. At the moment it is completely free, although after the beta phase there will be a charge for the Pro version hence making it part of the prize . The free tools seem like a good way to get into game development and if the Holiday Game Creator builds its community of users it should be off to a good start.