A very important aspect of any game jam is the fact that dozens (or even hundreds!) of other people are doing it at the same time! You should take this opportunity to make some new friends, find out what everyone else is doing, and share your own work.
This may be difficult to achieve effectively during the time limit, especially if you are new and you feel you need to spend all your time working on your game. That is fine, but please don't forget the jam after you publish your game! You should spend some time in the two weeks following the jam playing and rating other people's games, trying to give them your honest, constructive feedback.
As for how to effectively use social media and various digital platforms, here are a few tips to get you started:
If you find a group of friends to do a gamejam with, that's great! Being surrounded by a bunch of people with the same goal in mind as you (drink copious amounts of coffee and bash at the keyboard!) can be an awesome experience. You can share your ideas in person whenever you take a break, you can show each other your progress, or you can help debug tricky pieces of code.
If you are organising any gatherings for Alakajam!, please let us know!
Twitter is great to share your progress – individual updates are limited to 140 characters, so you won't spend an eternity writing them! Although you might find that your tweets are much more successful if you:
#alakajam#gamedev#indie#indiedev#gamejamOftentimes you have a game which you think is pretty cool, but find it hard to get people to look at it in the first place. Learn to capture short, interesting GIFs to catch their attention.
And some places to upload your amazing GIFs:
It is somewhat of a tradition for gamejam developers to write a "Post-mortem" blog post shortly after the end of the jam. This post is a place for you to talk about the challenges you faced, the interesting technical solutions, the just-in-time hacks, and much more. Tell people what went wrong, what went right, how your workflow could be improved. This is as much for others as it is for you! Describing the events of the gamejam can be an interesting exercise, and it can help you improve a great deal by forcing you to take a critical look at your own work. There are many places to post your post-mortem: