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:

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.

This was an interesting game jam because of the fact that my theme won. Although I didn't have any ideas for the theme. I was really hoping that one of my other themes would've won. Nature(one of the two) got 11th place.

My goal for this Alakajam was to make a game that was fun(placing high in gameplay). I somewhat failed at that because I made it too hard, although I still managed to get 4th in said category. I've been focusing on gane aesthetic for a while now, but this time I tried to do something different. I ended up placing 1st in graphics, so it seems like the graphics category is unrelated to the quality of the aesthetic in popular opinion. When it comes to aesthetic, my favorite game I've made was The Crushed Sky from the last Ludum Dare. I think the quality of the aesthetic can be seen in the mood category for the Ludum Dare. It would be really nice if aesthetic/mood were a theme in the AKJ.

What went well:

• the artwork
• visual fx
• mechanics

I think that the graphics were a clear success along with the visual fx. I think that I was capable of doing the visual fx better, but I didn't have very much time for it because I was busy on Sunday.

The mechanics felt really good in my opinion. I used a few platformer tricks to make everything feel nice. The one issue here is that the wall jumping system I used to make it a bit easier felt a bit unnatural to some people. A few people never figured out how wall jumping worked with my system even though it was clearly stated. I'm really not sure what a good way to do wall jumping is. The standard way would've resulted in a lot of pain in the fingers. One method that came to mind(which wouldn't work here) is how wall jumping works in something like King of Thieves where you just tap to wall jump. This relies on automatic movement, so it wouldn't be usable in a game like Lollipop Ninja.

What went poorly:

• level design
• music
• mechanics

The level design was obviously the biggest flaw here. Even though all the levels were linear, people would accidentally backtrack by dropping down to places they've been. It seems that I overestimated people's ability to tell where they are in a level. If you only went to places you've never been, there's only one spot in the game where there's a split path. Although if you look at it for a bit you can tell where you're supposed to go. @Aurel300 said that having to move so much makes it so you panic and can't pay attention to where you're going. I think there are some more subtle tricks I could use to show the player where to go though. One trick I plan on using in the update I'm working on is camera movement. For example: using the camera to show where you're heading.

The music was kind of a failure because I was too tired to figure anything out for it. I was working on it at like 4AM because I was running out of time, so I came up with some sort of drum track that gets played really quietly. I'm not sure what type of music would even make sense for a game like this. There's stealth and ninjas, but it also has a lighter mood because of the lollipops and the art style.

The final issue was with how the vision worked. The vision lines were slightly off(going from a bit up and to the left of the eyes of the people). Those still worked fine for the most part. The real issue was that you couldn't really tell where people were staring at you from. I assumed that since you could just go invisible and then hide in a smoke bomb that it wouldn't be a problem, but a lot of people would panic and not think to press X. This was something I fixed in the update I'm working on with vision lines.

Overall the game did pretty well. Even with its flaws, the people outside of the Alakajam thought it was very good(especially in the Pygame community). It maintains a 4.2 to a 4.6 out of 5 rating on Gamejolt and has been downloaded almost 1,800 times(this is after a couple weeks).

Try Lollipop Ninja Here

See ya'll next AKJ/LD!

Wow.

This jam sure was fun! I'm happy with how my game
turned out (for once), and I'm looking forward to expanding
on it in the future.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who played Room Swap, and congrats
to, well… everyone! Making a game is an accomplishment in and of
itself, I think. Looking forward to participating in future jams!

Thanks again!

A lak a jam or Al a ka jam?

We have had an awesome 2nd Alakajam! We want to shout out a big "Thank you" to everyone who made this jam that great, being it submitting/rating theme suggestions, creating games, rating games and giving valuable feedback. You are awesome!

71 Games were created during a very limited time and that alone is a great achievement. So congratulations to all solo or team devs who took part!
But of course Alakajam wouldn't be Alakajam without ratings and winners. So let's crown our winners!

Champions: Solo | Team

We hope you had a lot of fun, learned some new skills or found some new friends. As we try to make the event even more pleasing to you, we would also like to ask you for your feedback in this 2 minute survey.

Next Events

Of course we have the next jams ready for you. Mark your calendars!

3rd Alakajam: June 22nd to June 24th

4th Kajam: April 1st to April 30th hosted by Toasty (What is a Kajam?)

Behind the Scenes

The 2nd Alakajam was not run by a single person but by a growing group of enthusiastic people:

• The wan and only, who started Alakajam and keeps it running!
• Chief Video Officers Aurel300 and Danae who supported the jam with the wonderful opening ceremony
• Technical Managers: Aurel300, eldy, thomastc (recently active developers), but also thrainsa, toasty, rnlf, dollarone and more!
• Community Managers (IRC): tsjost, toasty, sorceress
• QA department: sorceress, cmlsc, yumaikas and various nice people who reported bugs :)

Also, thanks to all the streamers, youtubers and speedrunners who covered the event!

We hope to see you all for the next event!

If you haven't rated our game yet, give it a shot!

Drop a comment on this post or on our game and I'll return the favor and rate yours too!

Good luck!

https://alakajam.com/2nd-alakajam/144/you-cant-see-everything-at-once/

Since the jam ended I've been stuck on 4kbps internet and haven't managed to play many entries because everyone uploaded huge, presumably AAA quality games filled with high res textures and lossless format six hour soundtracks. I'll keep trying to play more, but would really appreciate it if you could take five minutes to try my entry https://alakajam.com/2nd-alakajam/137/garden-of-statues

I'm sure on your fancy non throttled internet connection it'll be but the work of a moment to download and open the game. Please enjoy your time in the garden, because there's more to it than it may initially seem