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)

In May, Alakajam! is not hosting a gamedev event. Instead, there's something completely new in the works: we'll play and compete on game jam entries!

How it works

Throughout the month, everyone will get to play on a selection of 8 games (made in any past game jams) 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 May 31st, the player with the most points wins the tournament!

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

The list of 8 jam games to played is still in the works, and should be finalized on April 30th. If your game supports setting a high score or a best time, please submit it below!

Submit your game here

EDIT: List is locked down, and unveiled on Twitter

A couple busy weeks put me a bit late with my 1v1 PvE platformer, but I'm back on track!

Throughout the month I have managed to complete all the basics & structure required to make the game playable, leaving this week-end to actually develop an interesting AI. All the iterations of that AI are actually going to be in-game as various levels. I hope to get at least 5 levels done:

• Level 1 (DONE): Almost idle AI
• Level 2 (DONE): Jumping around the map
• Level 3 (DONE): State machine-powered objectives
• Level 4 (IN PROGRESS DONE): Pathfinding
• Level 5 (TODO DONE): Tactics (health management, human movement anticipation)

I'm currently hacking together a waypoint system… and hoping it won't be too hard to build movement on top of it, so that the robot can actually jump on platforms correctly.

EDIT: And the game is finished at last! One day early for once :)

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

We went towards a pretty cinematic/atmospheric route for our Alakajam entry. The temptation was too strong, we had to make a trailer for the game! Here it is:

The next full-scale Alakajam! competition will take place on the June 22-24 week-end. We will post the detailed schedule early on that month.

Book the date, and see you then!

(NB. to make sure not to miss the event, you can also follow us either on Twitter or Reddit)

Congratulations everyone for joining the jam :) We have beaten the record of the first event, with already 69 games to play!

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 not too late to complete something! Game submissions will completely close Monday at 10pm UTC.

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

3D environments are hard! We're using Unity, and especially discovering ProBuilder for environments. Additional models are done with Blender.

We're also super late on schedule :D

If you're interested in finding people to enter the jam with, now is the time to check our Crowdforge page! You can ask for help in either art, code or music aspects of game making.

Go there and create a team, or check the existing ones:

Find a team on