An all new and expanded version of our team's 2nd Alakajam entry You Can't See Everything at Once featuring double the levels, a new original soundtrack and sounds, online leaderboards, and dozens of quality of life changes.
You Can't See Everything at Once + is a speedrunning focused hardcore platformer where you have to choose between seeing yourself and the level. Try to beat the game as fast as you can and compare your score to the rest of the world!
I have finally taken the time to redo my entry for the 2nd Alakajam!
"Transcribe" is a little puzzle game where you interact with the environment to find the hidden truth.
The post jam version has much improved graphics, more levels, a better level progression, and some new mechanics.
Check out the new version at https://silviacavadas.itch.io/transcribe !
And thank once again to the community for all the useful feedback they gave which informed this new version so much.
I finally got around to completing our timelapse for 2nd Alakajam. It features a webcam and screenshots captured with Chronolapse from me and @Juutis.
This was an interesting game jam because of the fact that my theme won. Although I didn't have any ideas for the theme. I was really hoping that one of my other themes would've won. Nature(one of the two) got 11th place.
My goal for this Alakajam was to make a game that was fun(placing high in gameplay). I somewhat failed at that because I made it too hard, although I still managed to get 4th in said category. I've been focusing on gane aesthetic for a while now, but this time I tried to do something different. I ended up placing 1st in graphics, so it seems like the graphics category is unrelated to the quality of the aesthetic in popular opinion. When it comes to aesthetic, my favorite game I've made was The Crushed Sky from the last Ludum Dare. I think the quality of the aesthetic can be seen in the mood category for the Ludum Dare. It would be really nice if aesthetic/mood were a theme in the AKJ.
What went well:
I think that the graphics were a clear success along with the visual fx. I think that I was capable of doing the visual fx better, but I didn't have very much time for it because I was busy on Sunday.
The mechanics felt really good in my opinion. I used a few platformer tricks to make everything feel nice. The one issue here is that the wall jumping system I used to make it a bit easier felt a bit unnatural to some people. A few people never figured out how wall jumping worked with my system even though it was clearly stated. I'm really not sure what a good way to do wall jumping is. The standard way would've resulted in a lot of pain in the fingers. One method that came to mind(which wouldn't work here) is how wall jumping works in something like King of Thieves where you just tap to wall jump. This relies on automatic movement, so it wouldn't be usable in a game like Lollipop Ninja.
What went poorly:
The level design was obviously the biggest flaw here. Even though all the levels were linear, people would accidentally backtrack by dropping down to places they've been. It seems that I overestimated people's ability to tell where they are in a level. If you only went to places you've never been, there's only one spot in the game where there's a split path. Although if you look at it for a bit you can tell where you're supposed to go. @Aurel300 said that having to move so much makes it so you panic and can't pay attention to where you're going. I think there are some more subtle tricks I could use to show the player where to go though. One trick I plan on using in the update I'm working on is camera movement. For example: using the camera to show where you're heading.
The music was kind of a failure because I was too tired to figure anything out for it. I was working on it at like 4AM because I was running out of time, so I came up with some sort of drum track that gets played really quietly. I'm not sure what type of music would even make sense for a game like this. There's stealth and ninjas, but it also has a lighter mood because of the lollipops and the art style.
The final issue was with how the vision worked. The vision lines were slightly off(going from a bit up and to the left of the eyes of the people). Those still worked fine for the most part. The real issue was that you couldn't really tell where people were staring at you from. I assumed that since you could just go invisible and then hide in a smoke bomb that it wouldn't be a problem, but a lot of people would panic and not think to press X. This was something I fixed in the update I'm working on with vision lines.
Overall the game did pretty well. Even with its flaws, the people outside of the Alakajam thought it was very good(especially in the Pygame community). It maintains a 4.2 to a 4.6 out of 5 rating on Gamejolt and has been downloaded almost 1,800 times(this is after a couple weeks).
See ya'll next AKJ/LD!
This jam sure was fun! I'm happy with how my game
turned out (for once), and I'm looking forward to expanding
on it in the future.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who played Room Swap, and congrats
to, well… everyone! Making a game is an accomplishment in and of
itself, I think. Looking forward to participating in future jams!
A lak a jam or Al a ka jam?
We have had an awesome 2nd Alakajam! We want to shout out a big "Thank you" to everyone who made this jam that great, being it submitting/rating theme suggestions, creating games, rating games and giving valuable feedback. You are awesome!
71 Games were created during a very limited time and that alone is a great achievement. So congratulations to all solo or team devs who took part!
But of course Alakajam wouldn't be Alakajam without ratings and winners. So let's crown our winners!
We hope you had a lot of fun, learned some new skills or found some new friends. As we try to make the event even more pleasing to you, we would also like to ask you for your feedback in this 2 minute survey.
Of course we have the next jams ready for you. Mark your calendars!
The 2nd Alakajam was not run by a single person but by a growing group of enthusiastic people:
Also, thanks to all the streamers, youtubers and speedrunners who covered the event!
We hope to see you all for the next event!
If you haven't rated our game yet, give it a shot!
Drop a comment on this post or on our game and I'll return the favor and rate yours too!
Good luck!
https://alakajam.com/2nd-alakajam/144/you-cant-see-everything-at-once/
Since the jam ended I've been stuck on 4kbps internet and haven't managed to play many entries because everyone uploaded huge, presumably AAA quality games filled with high res textures and lossless format six hour soundtracks. I'll keep trying to play more, but would really appreciate it if you could take five minutes to try my entry https://alakajam.com/2nd-alakajam/137/garden-of-statues
I'm sure on your fancy non throttled internet connection it'll be but the work of a moment to download and open the game. Please enjoy your time in the garden, because there's more to it than it may initially seem
Hello friends and jammers,
I've been unable to rate other games this time around due to family obligations, trying to still get my game ranked, so if you could take a few minutes to grab Dark Archer and rate it. Dark Archer is available on Windows, Mac or Linux and was a game from scratch based on my 7 week concept to release: Archer
Thanks for the help!