The next full-scale Alakajam! competition will take place on the October 12-14 week-end. We will post the detailed schedule early on that month. Book the date, and see you then!

Note that before then we will still host smaller events. Here's our current plans:

• A Kajam (in August) where you have a whole month to practice a specific aspect of game development.
• A Tournament (in September) where we'll just compete for high scores on Alakajam! games (like this!).

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

Congratulations everyone for joining the jam :) You just made a game in 48 hours, which is an impressive achievement in itself!

And if any one is left unsatisfied, or even could not finish their game, I'm sure it helped you improve your game making skills, meet some people, or just have a fun week-end so there's always something positive to take away from it. We're always growing after all B-)

Submissions are still open for unranked submissions: while those won't be officially ranked, they can expect as many people to play & comment on them. So, if you haven't finished your game in time, it's actually not too late to complete something! Game submissions will completely close Monday at 9pm UTC.

We will post more details about the voting phase tomorrow evening, but you can already go play & review games right now!

The time to work on your game ends tonight at 7pm UTC for ranked entries. After that time, you have one additional "submission hour" to build your game and submit it to the site. Be careful, because so the submission of ranked entries will be effectively closed at 8pm UTC.

Voting will start right after the submission hour, so if you are looking forward to play some games, you can do so right away.
Unranked jammers have additional 24 hours ( + submission hour) so for them the doors close on Monday at 9pm UTC.

Yesterday we were really unsure where the game was going, due to it being vastly overscoped. Given what we had done yesterday, we started this morning by detailed thinking about the gameplay, and how to scope things down while keeping the game fun.

We now have a detailed task list, and despite the removal of combat we are think we can have something fun by the end of the jam. With the most tricky parts of the code already completed by @Thrainsa, we are now building various systems at light speed! Today has been super satisfying so far. Let's hope it stays so until the end :)

Not only we're clearly overscoping gameplay-wise, but I'm spending waaay too much time on art - which I usually procrastinate, but for some reason I'm having fun this time,

The game is about building a ships out of modular pieces by doing EVAs in space. The goal is to save as many people as you can and leave the galaxy before a race of ever-expanding Replicants consumes it. No pressure :)

Concept art/color palette

Characters

This Saturday, members of Alakajam! will join the One Hour Game Jam held at 8pm UTC! Let's join our neighbor community for a fun evening of jamming, and so we can sharpen our tools before the Alakajam.

Who's in

@wan
@laguna
@puarsliburf
@akselmo
@dollarone
@sebastianscaini
@aurel300
@kdrnic
@sorceress

Also in but not 100% sure because they have a life (reportedly)

@voxel
@toasty
@raindrinker
@timbeaudet
@thrainsa
@euske

You? Let me know in the comments!

How it works

When	What
Before 8pm UTC	Prepare your dev environment before the jam starts, and join the fun on IRC or Discord
8pm UTC	The theme is announced, try to make a super small game in an hour!
9pm UTC	If all goes to plan (tip: it never happens), submit your game by the deadline. In practice most submit 30mn to a hour late, to finish something playable and publish it. Submissions are not closed until the next jam anyway!
9:30pm… ish	@aurel300 and maybe @danaeplays will play your games on stream!

No competition here, everyone is a winner for completing the crazy task of making a game in one hour-ish!

With @thrainsa we are going to join our forces once again! Here's our past Alakajam! entries:

1st Alakajam!	2nd Alakajam
Theme: Alchemy	Theme: You can't see everything
Philosopher's Strike (4th place overall)	Sword of Sight (3rd place overall)

We're going for Unity (C#) as usual. I'll be using, again as usual, Reason & Photoshop for music and art respectively, plus Blender if we end up making a 3D game.

Not sure what we'll want to make this time, but hopefully something not too ambitious so we can have enough time for contents & polish. Maybe an MMORPG.

After a full month of competition, the 1st AKJ Tournament is finally closed. Congratulations to @CMLSC for the well-deserved win! Nice job as well to @dollarone and @toasty who managed to get in the podium, and to all of the participants.

If you liked the event, know that we intend to make it a regular thing, the next occurrence being planned for the month of September. Some questions for next time:

• What do you think of the number of games? Was 8 a good number or would you have preferred less? More?
• Should we have prizes next time? (If so, it would be probably Steam games and/or Alakajam! goodies)
• Did you mind the games being mostly for Windows only?

Any other thought or suggestion is welcome.

As for the next event… The 3rd Alakajam is finally approaching! It will be hosted in th 22-24th June week-end, which means the detailed schedule will be published next Monday. See you then :)

Lollipop Ninja is probably the hardest game to post a score on, as it seems to take around 30' for most people to beat the first time. After finishing it twice I finally feel like I have the hang of it. So, a couple tips:

• The cooldown for Smoke bombs is super low, so use them A LOT. Since they can both be used on enemies and on yourself, you can basically advance through levels hiding behind smoke. The more confident you'll get, the less you'll have to use that.

• Going invisible is mostly useful to advance tricky sections with lots of jumps/wall jumps, until you can finally reach either a safe spot, or a flat place to hide behind smoke again. The cooldown is quite high here, so if you run into trouble try to hide in smoke waiting for the skill to ready. Again, with more confidence you'll realize some enemies can be passed without using the skill at all, by just rushing through.

• Sometimes it's hard to figure out where to go next, leading you to get lost a bit or end up in a hole. Some guy did a video speedrun of the game, so if you're getting too frustrated with the trial and error feel free to check that.

• The very final jump of the game requires a specific wall jump technique. It took me a lot of practice so just smoke the guy below the jump before each attempt and you'll be able to try for as long as you need. Basically the idea is to hold Left after the ninja has jumped, and then immediately switch to Right to reach the opposite wall. Again when at the right wall, keep holding Right when you jump, then immediately switch to Left. After a couple back and forths you'll be on that sweet lollipop.

EDIT: Some more tips courtesy of @Raindrinker

• You can walljump on top of a non-smoked enemy for a looong time because the sight line collides with the wall or something.
• Also vertical shafts are super safe, so waiting there for your invisibility cooldown to restore is quite useful.
• Going invisible resets your alert rate, so sometimes just running towards an enemy and pressing the skill in the last moment possible is enought to escape his gaze.

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Bonus: On Disappainted, use white paint to leave a slightly visible mark on the canvas. It can help you put down the contour of your drawing before you fill it with actual paint.

The 1st AKJ Tournament has begun! For the whole month of May, you will get to prove not your gamedev skills, but your gaming skills :) More rules info here

You'll find below the final selection of 8 games made by Alakajam! members. From arcade games to hardcore platformers to UFOs, you'll have plenty of material to test your skills. Have fun playing them and try your best to climb the leaderboard! A quick warning though: some games are Windows only. We'll aim for a fully cross-platform event next time, promised ;)

May the best player win!

The time has come
To prove you are the best
To crush your enemies
To win the Tournament (*)

Game	Author(s)	Genre	Jam
Disappainted: Master of the Invisibrush	dorkulon, cloakednunjas, treslapin	MSPaint	2nd Alakajam! (1st place)
You Can't See Everything at Once	sebastianscaini, EternalStormfire, Supermooper123, coleycaves	Platformer	2nd Alakajam! (4th place)
Lollipop Ninja	DaFluffyPotato	Platformer	2nd Alakajam! (4th place)
Whiteout	euske	Arcade skiing	2nd Alakajam! (9th place)
Spike	sorceress	Arcade labyrinth	2nd Alakajam! (13th place)
Cooperoids: Tournament Edition	toasty	Asteroids	MiniLD 74
Turbo/Glide	rnlf	Arcade transformer	Ludum Dare 35 (86th place)
Drift	Raindrinker	Arcade racing	Private jam hosted in Raindrinker's room and open to Raindrinker only (1st place)