I'm working on an idea I started on for the Music Kajam. Progress is slow and I am finding it hard to concentrate on dev at the moment.

I thought that creating a kind of dev diary and adding progress updates to it here might help with motivation. Let's try it!

Today I added fade-out and also fade-ins to the game. This is done by palette shifting through the available 4 colours. I think it works quite well!

Now that the music jam is officially over, I'd like to thank everyone who participated. Thanks!

If you want to check out the entries, they can be found here: https://alakajam.com/music-kajam/games

We got 4 entries in total and I think each of them are great. Everyone should feel proud of what they've accomplished! I know I do :)

Until the next time!

I managed to release Minimum Damage today, and only a couple of days late! I'm actually really happy with the end result: pretty much everything is amateurish, crass and probably broken, but unlike my other games it looks intentional.

This is the first time I've created music for a jam game, but it's been a hugely positive experience. In particular I found it a real relief to work on the music, and get away from the screen (or at least, the IDE) for a while. I've found - like with graphics - that having some concrete assets, no matter how tacky, in place really motivates me in the soul-crushing twilight that is the end stage of game jams. It also took the game in more imaginative directions than I think it could have gone otherwise.

In addition to the music, I'm quite happy with the original idea. For one thing the graphics were simple enough that I could implement them very quickly, allowing time to think about more important things. The execution is imperfect, but maybe I can work that out at a later stage.

So thanks, @Tijn, for hosting this jam! I certainly learned something.

I may come to regret this, but I had an idea to create a sheet music bullet hell game. After an hour or so of hacking I got this far.

Most of the basics are there; it just needs some simple collision code and then I can get started on the squishy bits.

P.s. Yes I'm aware that isn't a minim >__<

My original plan was to add music to a past jam game, but I have this little idea for a platformer that feels easy enough to explore. It will be pretty straightforward mechanics-wise, possibly quite hard, and as the gif suggests it will be synchronized to the music.

Good news is it took under two hours to get the basics in place with Unity. It's surprising that not many games I've seen explore that kind of stuff… The closest that comes to mind is the "140" indie game, otherwise I haven't seen it in jams that much.

The gif is only an early test so possibly not representative. I'm not 100% sure where this will end, but I have in mind some danceclub-like atmosphere with a heavy electro track on top, and difficult platforming where you find gaps between constantly moving shapes to try and stay alive. Let's see what I can get!

With the jam underway for 7 days now, it would be a good time to start sharing your ideas. You can create an entry earlier and update it later once you've made more progress.

What I want to make myself is a blues improvisation simulator. Jamming blues music is one of the staples of playing music together with fellow musicians. Because of its standard format and scale, anyone who knows these things even a little can jump in and join the fun that is improvising music together with other people.

Sadly most non-musicians never get to experience this, so I thought I'd try to find a way to simulate it somewhat. It's not going to be a game per se, but more an online toy / educational experience sort of thing. The idea is that I'll provide a virtual piano you can play with the keyboard of your computer. The twist is that you can only play notes that are in a blues pentatonic scale, which means that basically all notes will sound alright. To have something to play along with, I'll record a bunch of backing tracks on guitar which will provide a standard 12-bar blues framework. This way you can jam out on the virtual piano along with my guitar playing, so we're effectively jamming together :)

So yeah, that's what I'll be making. Show me what you've got in mind!

Welcome to the 8th Kajam! It's all about:

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Music is a big part of most games, but often it's only a thing that plays in the background. Although important to set the mood and communicate what's going on, for this kajam I'd like to put music more in the spotlight.

It would be great to see some creations in which music is the central subject. It can be anything as long it has some link to music, such as:

• A rhythm game!
• A dancing game!
• Maybe the protagonist is a musician!
• Or a composer!
• Or a sound engineer!

It doesn't even have to be a game in the traditional sense. Toys, experiences & experiments are very much encouraged. Anything goes, as long as it's all about the 🎵MUSIC 🎵

How does this work?

This Kajam follows the normal Kajam rules, which can be found here: https://alakajam.com/article/kajam-rules

The event starts 1 January and runs for the whole month. You're encouraged to submit your entry by Friday 24 January, so there will be a full week at the end of January for rating submissions. The event will end on Friday 31 January.

This is a relaxed game jam, so anything goes really. Just try to come up with a cool concept and use the time to make the best of it.

I don't have anything to make music with!

Luckily there are more tools than ever to help you make music / sounds nowadays. And a lot of them are even free! Back in 2017 I hosted a miniLD for which we compiled a whole lot of them. I've copied that list here, so you can try these suggestions to see if something clicks with you.

• BeepBox: http://www.beepbox.co/
• Bosca Ceoil: https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/bosca-ceoil
• Bfxr: https://donkeyspaceman.itch.io/bfxr
• Drumbot: http://www.drumbot.com/
• Sonant Live: http://sonantlive.bitsnbites.eu/
• Audiotool: https://www.audiotool.com/app
• LMMS: https://lmms.io/
• Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• Ardour: http://ardour.org/
• DarkWave Studio: http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/darkwave-studio/
• orDrumbox: http://www.ordrumbox.com/
• Temper: http://www.angryredplanet.com/temper/
• Mixxx: http://www.mixxx.org/
• Hydrogen: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/
• Rosegarden: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
• Qtractor: https://qtractor.sourceforge.io/
• MusE: http://muse-sequencer.org/
• Open ModPlug: https://openmpt.org/
• MilkyTracker: http://milkytracker.org/
• SunVox: http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
• FamiTracker: http://www.famitracker.com/
• MadTracker: http://www.madtracker.org/
• Many more trackers: https://woolyss.com/tracking-trackers.php
• And even more trackers: https://woolyss.com/chipmusic-chiptrackers.php
• pxtone: http://www.cavestory.org/pixels-works/pxtone-collage.php
• blipseq: https://drive.google.com/
• FL Studio: https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/
• BeepComp: http://hiromorozumi.com/beepcomp/

If you have a suggestion of your own, please let me know in the comments and I'll make sure it gets added :)

That's all for now. Have fun & good luck!

The 8th Kajam will start with the new year and will focus on Music!

It will be hosted by game developer and musician @Tijn (Twitter). His experience in music includes contributing songs (as Nerk) to the soundtrack of PC game My Summer Car, composing the occasional chiptune with the Adlib tracker and having a weird passion for exotic VST plugins.

Stay tuned for more details :)