My project will be called BDSM (Bomb Defusal Squad Machines)
A level (which is mostly the one I used while testing to make sure everything is bugless) is operative!

Is the UI understandable, even without tutorialisation? Please, if you want and can, try the level and tell me if you managed to beat it (deactivated the bomb) and if you understood everything or misunderstood anything. Thanks! :)

https://raindrinker.itch.io/bdsm

I'm about to embark on coding the animation stuff; but first I needed a nice animation to test it out with, so here it is. Originally I was animating the arms too, but it seems to look more (or less, perhaps?) natural this way; it's a robot, after all :D

I expect that adding animations to the game will take a couple of days, but once it's done my crappy texturing the sky is the limit for the graphics in this game!

All hail Wingardium LevioJam!, the new incarnation of Alakajam!

After launching this website back in July 2017, we quickly realized its name wasn't completely effective, as a lot of people didn't get the pun between "game jam" and the "Alakazam!" magic word (which it definitely is). Because of that, we have finally grown tired of the Alakajam! name and decided to retire it.

After long debates and dozens of rejected names, including "Code Prog-jammers", "World Jam-pionship", and "OSWALD" ("OSWALD Surely Wasn't Another Ludum Dare"), we unanimously praised the discovery of the awesome pun: Wingardium LevioJam!

Sure, we feared for a moment that the name was a bit long and forced, but then we remembered this great quote:

"Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself" - Albus Dumbledore

Inspired by these great words, we have eventually decided to stick with the name and launched this new version of the site. We hope you'll like it!

UPDATE: Our lawyers suggested we retire the "Wingardium LevioJam!" theme & name, due to similarities with an existing license. It only lasted for April 1st, too bad!

I got my model loading working today. It's been a bit of work but my OpenGL understanding has increased massively. I've also learned what happens if you specify the wrong image format ^^

I'm in (somewhat obviously)!

I'd like to make something top-down and tinker with some adversarial AI. I've been hacking around with OpenGL quite a lot in recent weeks, and would love to turn my delicious spaghetti codebase into a game for this jam. Time might be a little tight as it's very rough and incomplete, so if that fails, my back-up plan is to use Old Faithful and whip something up in JS.

Would also be nice to turn my abysmal 1/3 attendance record into a pitiful 2/4. We'll see!

I love Artificial Intelligence, I actually just finished computer engineering, and did some things in that department, but I almost always end up disappointed when I try to really go deep with AI in games.

A project I had in the backburner for some time is a game like the ones by Zachtronics, where the player is asked to "program" the solution of a puzzle, with a lot of freedom. I once tried to envision a game where you design the "orders" for a military squad, almost programming without noticing, and they follow them and hopefully end up victorious. Gladiabots does something similar with quite a success.

I'd really like to make a game like that, a game that is thinking-heavy, but you're not solving puzzles, you're solving problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1_zmx-wU0U (Mark Brown's video on that)

Ill decide a genre (puzzle platformer probably) and design an interface so you can "program" the player character/s. Let's see how it goes.

Good luck to all! :D

Hopefully today's not yet the day I will break my achievement of entering all Kajams. Here's a quick look at my previous entries:

1st Kajam	2nd Kajam	3rd Kajam
Theme: Game juice	Theme: Sound Effects	Theme: Story
Rat Park	Kommandant RNLF	Unknown Sender

For this new event I'm currently thinking of the following:

• Pixel-art platformer on a unique, single-screen level
• 1-on-1 fight against AI with a variety of items
• Randomized weapon/heal/buff spawn

In short, something close to a simplified Super Crate Box with a nice opportunity to have fun with the AI. I don't think I'll do too much technical research on AI in general, I'll just have fun with a finite state machine.

EDIT: First progress gif (red is an AI jumping around randomly)

EDIT2: I have created a page for my work-in-progress entry as Robot Duels

Rise of the robots

Improvise, adapt, and overcome! Or at least, tell a computer how to do that. Yes, the 4th Kajam's theme is Artificial Intelligence.

AI has been used in games since at least the early '70s, becoming more popular with classics like Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980). Genres —like RTS and FPS—from the '90s brought the development of AI in games to a new level, and with more recent titles like the Half-Life episodes we started to see quite convincing cooperative AI.

Your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to create a game using AI in some way. It doesn't have to CRUSH ALL HUMANS be particularly complicated: if you're stuck for ideas, try tweaking your path-finding algorithms; creating a novel NPC; or just making a really hard-to-beat opponent. If that doesn't suit you, other takes on the theme are very welcome too! (Edit: In particular if you'd rather make a game where the player has to write the AI, that's also fine!)

Schedule

• March 29th - April 23rd: The jam. Make a small gam, trying to focus on AI in ways you might not have done before. Spend as much or as little time as you want, and work with others or alone. There are no rules, so just try to have fun!
• April 23rd - April 30th: Feedback time! For a whole week, all entrants can play and rate other people's games. Try to give encouragement for things that went well, and useful suggestions on what to improve.
• April 30th: The results!

For inspiration

• How to simplify your AI code with Finite State Machines – an introduction to state machines and how to model simple, deterministic behaviour of AI
• The Monte Carlo Method for Game AI – for finding good-looking moves in a somewhat random fashion, useful when there are just too many things that an AI can do
• What Makes Good AI? – some considerations for what a player could appreciate in enemy AI
• A* search algorithm – extremely popular algorithm for pathfinding, navigation, or even finding "paths" in other kinds of state spaces
• Artificial Intelligence in Games – a summary of various kinds of AIs you might want to use for different game genres
• Artificial Intelligence in Board Games – simple techniques for AI in the board game genre
• Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI – for more story-rich, emotionally-focused games

My first project as an independent interactive-digital-media developer is finished.

is a pausable real-time light-tactics single-player competition.

Try the WebGL demo

Here

Cheers!
PS. Project 2 has begun!

I finally got around to completing our timelapse for 2nd Alakajam. It features a webcam and screenshots captured with Chronolapse from me and @Juutis.