The 21st edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday, February 21st!

The event is about making a game, from nothing, in a weekend. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. If you opt-in to the competition, you will get to be ranked against every other contestant! Or if you prefer a more relaxed setting, maybe even work on your current hobby project, the Open jam will still give you an opportunity to get plays and comments.

Schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
February 7th	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
February 14th	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
February 21, 6pm UTC	Kickoff stream	A livestream will be hosted by @DanaePlays and @Aurel300 in the final hour before the start!
February 21, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
February 23, 7pm UTC	End of ranked jam	The main competition ends here, exactly 48 hours after the start time. Submissions will remain open for an additional hour after the deadline.
February 24,10pm UTC	End of open jam	This permissive deadline, without game ratings, lets you work on your current game project and submit it for feedback. It aso works if you want to go for a relaxed weekend without ratings, or just need the extra time to finish your work.
March 9, 7pm UTC	Results	After two weeks during which all entrants are invited to play, rate and comment on other peoples games… The results are released and the winners crowned!

Rules

There are three divisions:

- Solo, in which you make a whole game alone in 48 hours
- Team, in which any number of persons can gather to make a game in 48 hours
- Open, a more open division which grants about 72 hours to finish the game. Useful for those not interested in the competitive aspect of the event, want to work on an existing project of theirs, or simply did not finish their game in time.

See the full rules for the Alakajam.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

1. Create an account on this website
2. Publish your game before the deadline

A tradition for jammers is also to introduce themselves with an "I am in" blog post before the event. Describe what tools and frameworks and engines you will use to create your awesome game! Which themes do you like? Let us and the community know!

If you can, feel free to spread the word about the jam - the more we are, the merrier! glhf ;)

As a small event in-between the game jams, we challenge you to post high scores on a selection of games from past Alakajam events!

It includes Abyss Meal (by @Ilkalys and @jcochet) and Cave Exploder (by @yozy) as fun little arcade games, and two more games that are more on the puzzle side: CARA GRABS ANTIMATTER (by @voxel) is a nice puzzler with speedrun potential, while Work Until Done (by @thomastc) is a more involved optimization game that will get you busy for a while.

Big thanks to the game authors for opening up their games for tournament use, and good luck to all players to climb the leaderboard!

Hello, AKJers!

AKJ 20 has joyfully finished and I'm happy with my result. This is the first jam for me since 2021-ish, and there has been a few changes to my development environment:

• The time I can spend for the jam has been greatly reduced (to only a few hours!).
• I've lost my desktop Linux.

So I've also changed my development style to adapt for this:

• Make most tasks doable with Windows + VS Code only.
• Make everything very raw and primitive. No engine and no external depdendency. It's just a plain vanilla JS with HTML. (If you're curious, take a look at the source of my entry (https://games.tabesugi.net/regex/)
• Proactively make a set of copy-pastable code (a.k.a. "the framework").

This has been working well so far. But jam-wise, I see a few rooms for improvement:

• Be mindful of the "mechanics" of a game. I tend to cram many things into one game and people see it's "chaotic". (in my game, things like a peculiar one-button control, circular level, multiplying enemies and river, etc.)
• Think carefully what could be randomized or changed. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't change the control schema (a.k.a "regex" pattern) every time, so that people can get used to control.
• A little playtesting before submission would have been useful. (The game was probably too hard for many.)

That's it! I'm looking forward to particupate more. Thank you for organizing this event.

i'm really glad I got this project done. I've been meaning to learn godot for such a long time now, but, yknow, committment issues. anyways, I GOT IT DONE!!

i ran out of time to compose music properly, so instead I sat down at the piano, improvised some space-y lofi sounding stuff, then bitcrushed it to hell and back and called it a day. i like the way it turned out, personally.

i'm looking forward to playing the other entrants' games!!!! :3

For the 20th Alakajam, the theme as voted on and run through the process and corrupted by evil hackers and memes made up by dedicated alakajammers, is…

"In a loop"!

With this announcement, the 20th AKJ has begun! To reiterate what I said before, we will have
13-15th Sep main jam
16th extra day for unranked participants
17th-31 Sep rate the games!
1 Oct reveal the results!

Go make your wonderful games! May the theme inspire you!

Prepare your game engines! The 20th AKJ will take place on 13th-15th of September. The week before will be dedicated to theme voting! And before that, we will submit themes! Since we always seem hate the theme, don't forget to submit a theme you actually like!

Our dates will look like:

If you've participated in an Alakajam before, you should know what to expect! And if not, it is easy to follow along, and we will be putting more info before things happen!

I made my game Yelp for the limitations kajam. Despite 6 weeks of jam time, I was still coding in the final hour. 🥲

I'm glad I submitted something, but there's very little actual gameplay and it's not particularly fun either. I focused mainly on the "Over-sensitive" limitation (use as many inputs as possible) and chose to use the microphone to propel the player and trigger attacks, but I quickly ran into technical issues. I couldn't always reliably detect and utilise microphone input (possibly because of noise cancelling and/or a lack of API understanding), so ultimately I restricted it to just attacking. Even then there is a noticeable lag between screaming at the computer and it actually attacking (possibly this could be reduced if I better understood the various HTML/JS audio APIs). Still, I think it's pretty novel for a jam game and I'm glad I tried.

Originally I'd aimed for a horror game, and the game briefly had a shroud around most of the screen. Not being able to see what's coming is a common horror trope and it did improve the feel. But I also wanted to aim for the "Geometron" (no textures; geometry only) limitation, and a decent-looking shroud meant technically using a texture, even if it was auto-generated. It's also a tall order to create a horror game without sounds for atmosphere.

I learned a lot, though. This is the first graphical (i.e. not mostly HTML/UI) game I've made in a while. Turns out Pixi.js is still a solid rendering engine. I was less keen on matter-js for physics, mostly because the docs aren't very helpful and the API isn't always predictable. I'd happily use Pixi again, but would be tempted to seek another physics solution (library or roll my own).

Congratulations to everybody who participated! There are some very interesting games so go ahead and try them.

What's next?

Remember that we have the 20th Alakajam on 13th of September, and another tournament in October. Check the events page for more details.

Congratulations to everybody who participated! There are some very interesting games so go ahead and try them.

What's next?

Remember that we have the 20th Alakajam on 13th of September, and another tournament in October. Check the events page for more details.