The 24 days of the 2nd Kajam, focusing on Sound Effects, have passed by. Congrats to the entrants!

Due to the low entry count, we have decided to bypass the voting phase and just end the jam as is. Everyone is a winner! We're leaving entry submissions open throughout the end of the month for any late entrant.

Until the next jam, go check the submitted games and make sure to leave a comment on them!

See you next year and… Happy holidays to all! :)

Warm up your mikes, prepare your Sfxrs, and set your volume to 11 on this new instalment of Kajam!

This time we will be focusing entirely on sound effects. Audio feedback, explosions, pew pews - you name it!

Sound design and sound effects in games are perhaps less celebrated than beautiful graphics and tight controls, but it can really change the experience of a game. Music can be very important but sound effects can make a game memorable and immediately send you back to a certain situation when you later hear the sound.

Let's put the focus on sound effects and see how that affects our games!

Schedule

• Dec. 1st - Dec. 24th: The jam. The goal is simply to make a small game while focusing on Sound effects. Make your game over an evening or during the entire period - work solo or in a team. There's little to no rules - just a chance to practicing your soundcraft. If you're curious though, feel free to check the event rules.
• Dec. 24th - Jan. 1st: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate the Sound effects of the other games. Like on the first event: no Overall ratings, we'll only judge Sound effects.
• Jan. 1st: Start the new year by discovering which games had the most effective Sound effects!

Resources

List of free game sound sites
Wilhelm Scream (did you know there's also a Howie scream?)
Trusty old Sfxr and related as3sfxr, Chiptone, and jsfxr
Tutorial on how to use the libs above
Bfxr, Sfxr's younger brother
Wavosaur
Intro to Web Audio API
Tips for sound design in games
Bobby Prince (id software) on Sound Effect Design
Zachary Quarles (also id software) on game audio design documents
Excerpt from "The Complete Guide to Game Audio"
Sound Effect Fonts!
The story behind Batman’s fight graphics (OK, going off on a tangent here…)

Good luck! And have fun!

After a week of voting, the results of the first monthly competition are out! Congratulations to the podium ;) And thanks to all who took part in playing & reviewing the games.

The next Kajam will start this Friday evening (7pm UTC), i.e. on December 1st. Our first guest host will be @dollarone, announcing the theme once again as the event launches. See you this week-end!

I made a simple room based level generator for Infested Zone. It is heavily inspired by the generator in Spelunky.
Here's how it ticks.

The generator

1. Create a room database

In the handy dandy CSV format. The first line designates the type of the room, which sides it contain doors (openings) on and if it can be rotated or not.

Room Base 1 1 0 0 r
w,w,w,w,.,.,w,w,w,w
w,l,w,w,.,.,w,w,l,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,w,.,.,.,.,.,.,w,w
w,l,w,w,w,w,w,w,l,w
w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w,w

Extremely easy to setup in LibreOffice Calc with conditional formatting,

Likewise easy to implement in Unity. Just read the file and split lines with comma as the separator.

(I'm not going to bore you with code)

2. Create a 5x5 grid

A multidimentional int array, nothing else is needed.

3. Set one of the corners as the goal

Just pick a random corner. No safeguards here.

4. Find a valid path from the center to the goal using random walk

Random walk: pick a random direction, keep track of positions already visited, back up if surrounded by walls or visited positions, stop if goal reached otherwise repeat. A recursive function works well here.

This results in all sorts of paths. At worst the whole grid is filled, but usually gives a pretty straight forward path. The random walk can be skewed towards the goal position by weighting the direction choosing part (I'm not doing this as you can see in the gif below)

5. Add a valid sequence of rooms to the path

Making sure the doors match. Other than that the rooms are completely random. This is where earmarking each room with its doors comes to great use.

6. Add random rooms to other positions.

The randomization can be weighted or otherwise limited here if the results looks silly. Rooms with less doors seem to work pretty well as they don't mess too much with the path.

Done deal!

Conclusion

The room database is the saving grace here. No need to worry about invalid connections or silly shapes as the rooms are authored by a human designer. Rotating them adds a surprising about of variation too and the FOV system hides the grid like shape of the level pretty well.

Congrats to all the entrants of the 1st Kajam!

This first event proved to be intimate with just 4 entries. I hope that even those of you who could not complete their games in time still had fun, and maybe learnt about game feel in the process! I've left the submission form open for late entrants.

Now for the little surprise: Game voting is open to everyone having an Alakajam! account. Curious to see how juicy our games turned out? Try them and leave a rating! And don't forget to review @HuvaaKoodia 's unranked entry as well ;)

The results of the tiny competition will be revealed this Sunday, 7pm UTC as usual.

My game Endless Assault submitted.
Not as juicy as i was hoping, but had fun making it and I learned a bit more about unity's lighting and particle effets so overall ok.

The Kajam month-long event series continues, with @dollarone being the planned host for the next event. Just like the first event was focused on Game juice, the next one will be targeting a different aspect of game development chosen by its host. It will be announced on December 1st.

Schedule

• Dec. 1st - 24th: The jam. You'll have around one month to work on a game and submit your entry! (see also the event rules). Note: You are allowed to submit your in-progress entry to let people know you are entering, then edit the page later.
• Dec. 25th - 31st: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate the other games according to the topic of the month (to be announced).
• Jan. 1st: The event results

Stay tuned through Twitter or Reddit to be reminded of the event launch!

I had grand plans for 1st Kajam: https://alakajam.com/post/235/a-la-kajam.
How did it turn out? Well, I managed to get a game out, and there is some polish to it, but nowhere near to what I had in mind.
It seems working on a game for a month or so is much harder than working on a game for just a weekend.

It was a pleasant experience anyhow, so no regrets.

Teleballtation

I've been distracted by some other games. My attention span for making games isn't very long, so I lost interest in the project for the Kajam pretty fast. ._.

Distraction #1(making a pokemon game from the ground up):

Distraction #2(messing around with perlin noise):
https://twitter.com/DaFluffyPotato/status/928466402633232386

Distraction #3(making an online co-op shooter roguelike):
https://twitter.com/DaFluffyPotato/status/929481927756861440

I don't think these long game jams are a good idea for me, I switch projects constantly, so it's hard for me to actually care about a single project for that long. There have only been 3 games I've made that I never lost interest in developing for more than a month, and I've been making games for 4 years. 48 hour game jams are perfect for me though! ^-^

I'm looking forward to the next Alakajam! and I'll probably see some of you during Ludum Dare #40.

This is where I stopped on the project(also in my last post):

Finished early. Sure enough could spend more time on polish, but other projects are awaiting so better cut it here.

Try it out (no WebGL due to unity issues, unfortunately)