I feel this theme is really challenging, but it would be very fun to see the original ideas of the partecipants. I really look forward to play all the games :D
Good luck to everyone!

Tools:

REPLICA Framework 1.5
Krita + pen, pencil and paper
BeepBox
jsfxr

The theme — I’m not sure what to do with it, but it has potential. I’ll think of something.

Удачи!

With the theme now revealed, the 15th Alakajam! has started. Let's make games :)

If you're entering the competitive, ranked jam, and are unsure what you're allowed to do, please check this page for the detailed rules of the jam (in particular the "What is allowed?" section).

Submission times

The end of the jam is depending on whether you pick ranked or unranked. You can create your game page at any time during the jam (and update it any time after it's created):

• Ranked: June 19th 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 48 hours (+1 hour for late entries to create their page).
• Unranked: June 20th 10:00pm UTC, which means you have a bit more than 72 hours.

Big thanks to @DanaePlays and @Aurel300 for hosting the launch stream! If you missed it, you can still find it on her Twitch channel.

Cool things to do during the jam

• Write a blog post: Share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of food or gifs of cute animals. You can also free to use posts for advertising live jam streams.
• Tweet about #alakajam and follow the alakajam Twitter account
• Initialize your game page early!

Have a nice week-end all of you, and see you on the other side!

This is my first game jam ever! I just started making games a couple months ago, so I'm a bit nervous that I won't complete a game. The pixel art is primarily where I'm worried all my time will be spent. I'm going to make my game with java using the libGDX framework.

As this weekend is going to be crazy hot here in germany, I will use the days to be as close to water as possible :D
That leaves me with the nights, which is where I'll try to fit the gamedeving.
I would assume this gives me around 12h of time in total, so I'm definitely looking forward to this challenge.

Like in the past couple of gamejams, I'm gonna use pico-8 to create my game.
See you all!

And by "computer" I mean a thing with a physical keyboard, of course; smartphones and ebooks don't count. I know there are probably ways to make a game on a phone, but poking my eyes out with a fork sounds only marginally less pleasant than that.

Instead, I'm bringing a deck of cards and will design you a card game this time! I know it says "video game" in the rules, but a conversation in Discord made it clear that this is an oversight; it was never intended to exclude physical games.

I'll only use a regular deck of 52 playing cards and maybe some tokens, and probably aim for a single-player game, so the threshold for playing and rating shouldn't be too high.

It'll be interesting.

Because we only had a few days of Header Space, I just wanted to make sure enough people are aware of the cool entries of the 12th Kajam.

Play some games within games!

The 12th Kajam is officially over and I want to thank everybody who took time to create an entry and submitting it. The theme was very dear to me, so overall I'm a bit disappointed by the low turn-out. Nonetheless, please have a look at all the submitted games!

Over the next few days I hopefully get to try the other games and maybe even do a stream about the event.

Ok, so I just uploaded the game to itch with 15 minutes left on my watch, 10 minutes left on the event website :)
I think I made it in time and this was still admissible, no idea how the exact timing is verified.

This is my first game jam entry as a programmer and my personal goal was to submit something that has a beginning, middle and end and does not crash.
I think from that perspective this is a success.
Another initial goal of mine was to program something in Ziglang, but after the first week it was clear that I it would be fairly tough to build anything resembling an actual game. I had problems with Zig's Raylib bindings, because it crashed for some reason if I set the game to fullscreen. Some other zig gamedev libraries are in very early stages and since I'm not experienced in low level rendering APIs that didn't work out either.
So, slightly disappointed with myself, I did the sane thing and chose an engine I knew: Godot.

Phil and I came up with the initial game design on a 2 hour bus trip to a concert. The original idea was to build an Arkanoid clone with bricks that are levels within the level and you can zoom deeper into them, basically like inception, but you could see every level layer at the same time squashed to the edges of the screen and time would go on on all levels, but slowed down heavily, again like in inception.
That did not work out because it was hard to visualize and I could not figure out a nice way to render it in Godot (I'm sure it's possible, but I decided to do something that had a bigger chance of becoming playable).
Now new levels are simply teleported into the game on top of the previous levels.
I did some quick initial placeholder graphics for the bricks and paddle, which are still in the final jam entry.
For the music I created a placeholder soundtrack using abundant music and did some cleanup of the midi file in LMMS, exported to OGG Vorbis. This placeholder is also still in the final jam entry.
Next time, I'll take more care while creating placeholders because they will probably end up in the final product.

To make sure every entry gets the attention and polish it deserves (and also because I won't have internet this weekend), I moved the Kajam's deadline to the last day of May!