The first full-scale Alakajam! of 2019 will take place on the February 22-24 week-end! We will post the detailed schedule early on that month. Book the date :)

Note that in between main competitions, we always host a variety of smaller events. The current plan (to be confirmed) is as follows:

Month	Event	Description
November	November Challenge 2018	Make a commercial release of a project of yours, jam game or other… And make $1 out of it!
December	Feedback Fortnight 2018	Exchange feedback with the community on any project you worked on this year
January	6th Kajam	Practice a specific aspect of game development during this month-long game jam

To make sure not to miss the next events, you can also follow us either on Twitter or Reddit.

We should be back this week-end to defend our title ;)

Techs

• Unity3D
• Blender (if 3D)
• Photoshop
• Propellerhead Reason
• Audacity

Team

While our team is always the same (sometimes with guests), we occasionally split roles differently depending on our goals/interests for the week-end. This time we might be tempted to do something inspired by the 3D action platformers of the 90s (Spyro/Crash Bandicoot/Mario 64).

• @thrainsa as developer & project planner
  • Personal goal: Practice planning/scoping, maybe explore new Unity features
• @wan as graphic & audio artist
  • Personal goal: Improve 3D texturing and animation skills

Good luck everyone, and happy jamming!

Ever since releasing our 3rd Alakajam! entry A.G. Hope, I've had plenty of ideas to expand it into something more ambitious. I feel that with some effort (towards replayability and content variety) it could get good enough to make me comfortable selling it.

So my goals for November would be:

• Finish rewriting the core ship building mechanic (something I started after the jam but never finished)
• Define a MVP for pricing it at $2 probably
• Complete the game
• Publish it on itch.io

I'm not sure how much time I'll have to work on the game though, so if I want to make it I should probably start straight away ^^

It's been over three months since the last Alakajam. The next competition will take place on the 12-14 October weekend!

The goal of the event is simple: make a game, from scratch, in just a weekend. You can do this on your own, or in a team, you can be a seasoned pro or a total beginner. If you opt-in to the competition, you will get to be ranked against all the other contestants!

First we need to decide on a theme, which we do by letting people submit their ideas and vote for all other submissions. Once we are closer to the jam, we will crop the list to the top 10 suggested themes, and there will be a second voting phase. The final theme will be revealed on stream just as the 4th Alakajam starts!

The full schedule is listed below:

Schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
September 28 - October 5th	Theme submission & voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
October 5-12nd	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
October 12, 6:30 UTC	Countdown stream	DanaePlays and Aurel300 host an official stream on Twitch to launch the event!
October 12-14th	THE JAM!!!	From Friday 7pm UTC to Sunday 7pm UTC, make a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
October 12-15th	Unranked jam	If you want to go for a relaxed weekend - or need more time - you can create a game in the 72 hours of the unranked jam.
October 14-28th	Game voting	For two weeks all entrants are invited to play, rate and comment on other peoples games.
October 28th	Results	The results from game voting are released and the winners are 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
• Unranked, 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 lot of participants also post an "I am in" blog post presenting themselves or their team 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! And of course: good luck and have fun ;)

Maybe the trickiest game of the tournament is Whirling Blades, a mouse-only game where all items are used automatically. It can be difficult to understand exactly how things works in the fast-paced action, yet there is a lot of depth to uncover. Let's figure things out together!

Please share in the comments section any info or correction you have, I'll update this post accordingly.

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Items

Item	Dropped	Triggers	Action
Blueberry	Bushes with visible fruits	When the energy bar is depleted	Refills the energy bar
Apple	Trees with visible fruits	When the health bar goes below a certain level	Refills the health bar
Seeds	Fruitless trees & bushes	When walking on a corrupted tile	Reverts the tile to normal grass
Gel	All enemies	When item count reaches a certain value	Upgrades the weapon - First upgrade = 60 gel - Second upgrade = 150 gel - Third upgrade???

Enemies

Enemy	Properties
White insect	Simply runs towards you. May randomly transform into Double spike creatures. If you're cornered, they can deal massive damage due to no attack cooldown.
Double spike	Does not move. Fires artillery strikes that corrupt tiles.
White mask	Moves slowly, shooting purple boomerangs at you.

Tips

• Corrupted tiles: They slow you down, and destroy any living plant on them. Corruption spreads with time to neighbor tiles. In the early game, you can delay the spread of corruption a bit by restoring grass as soon as you can with your seeds. More generally, clear the spike enemies early to prevent them from firing their corrupting attacks.
• Dashing: Useful not only for escaping monsters but also as an attack. Actually seems more powerful than the basic attack.
• Item gathering: It doesn't seem like plants or fruits grow/spread, so gather everything you find as fast as possible.
• Saving blueberries: Technically your energy bar resplenishes automatically, so if you're careful with your clicking, you can save blueberries for later… But to be honest the blueberries rarely empty, so click away!!!

The 5th Kajam took place during the month of August, seing 9 entries submitted around the "Retro" theme. If you want to join the next one, know that it will take place in November, and will be hosted by regular member @DaFluffyPotato!

But what is a Kajam?

Kajams are relaxed competitions taking place over a full month, in which we make a video game focusing on a specific aspect of game making. The rules are pretty open, and don't require you to work throughout the month - even a tiny game made in an evening, or an improvement of an existing game of yours can fit! Kajams are perfect to learn, experiment and improve your gamedev skills. Detailed rules here.

The topic of the next Kajam will be chosen by its host and announced upon the start of the event. Follow us on Twitter or Reddit to stay updated!

EDIT: The Kajam is cancelled - what about we host something different this time? To be announced shortly!

My plans for August were to make a game for Ludum Dare 42 that could also fit this month's Kajam. When the LD came up with the theme "Running out of space", I quickly got the idea of a terminal game where the goal was to free space. I also felt slightly lazy at that time, and not too excited by the idea of writing a fake file system with commands for it, for some reason. When @Aurel300 offered me to join his LD entry as a composer, I was quite quick to accept, and immediately trashed my game idea x)

Fast forward to this morning - after a few days, the scrapped idea had time to grow on me a bit, and I felt I could still explore it for the Kajam. Making working terminal commands was more fun and less work than I expected! After 2 or 3 hours I could eventually add the game contents, and take some time to polish various corner cases (I was sure some players would try obscure things to see what they would do, so I didn't want to disappoint :P)

The end result took about 4 hours to make, it is short but hopefully fun. Let me know what you think!

In September, Alakajam! is not hosting a gamedev event. Instead, we will play jam games! (omg)

How it works

For two weeks, everyone will get to play on a selection of 6 games (mostly from the 3rd Alakajam) on which they'll try to make the highest scores/best times as possible. Using screenshots as proof, players will battle to enter (and remain in) the leaderboards.

Leaderboards points are awarded to all players that enter the top 10 of a game. At the end of the event, on September 23rd, the player with the most points wins the tournament! Check the 1st tournament winners to see the current title holders :)

As usual, there's no prizes to be won other than bragging rights. We're just here to have fun!

Submit your game to the event

Hosts @toasty and @wan will pick games among those that:

1. Have a game page on Alakajam!
2. Have enabled the "High scores" option on their page
3. Haven't been featured in a tournament yet

If you want us to check out an entry you made:

Submit your game here (Selection is over!)

Our entry A.G. Hope has been updated! The original jam version has been patched with a couple major bugfixes, but we also took the time to make a post-compo of the game.

This new version is still far from our the original, way too ambitious goals, but brings the game on par with how we pictured it on the Sunday morning after refining the game design:

• Restored a fourth level (which got lost by mixing > and >=)
• Ships are powered off by default, requiring an EVA to dock them
• Fixed enemy spawn issues, making them more dangerous
• Some level balancing
• Minor tweaks eg. randomizing the ship rotations

Big thanks in passing to all who already reviewed our game! We're super happy with the game reception so far, and would love to hear thoughts on the new version.

Good news everyone! After a calm month of July (which was actually quite busy behind the scenes, but that's another story), we are now preparing the launch of the 5th Kajam!

But what is a Kajam?

Good question!

Kajam competitions are month-long events in which people make a small video game focusing on a specific aspect of game making. For instance the previous jam, hosted by @toasty was about Artificial Intelligence. Kajams are perfect to learn, experiment and improve your gamedev skills! Detailed rules here.

The topic of the 5th Kajam will be chosen by its host @laguna and announced upon the start of the event.

Follow us on Twitter or Reddit to stay updated!