My first venture into 3D. It's gonna be hard to get something playable out, but I'm motivated!
Blender is still so difficult to use and I need a tutorial for everything but I'm going to make every model myself anyway.

Here's a gif of what I've got after a couple of nights.

https://gfycat.com/ShyKaleidoscopicFlyingfish

I'm going to follow the theme and make the story the main focus.
See you on the other side!

Hello you, I’m HuvaaKoodia; we might have exchanged words in the past! Didn’t have time for Kajam last time (and probably not this time either unfortunately) due to putting together my plan for this year. In short, I’m going independent (Exciting times!) making multiple 2 month solo project from scratch. Mostly for fun, maybe for profit?

Here's the devlog at TigSource for the first project.

Just so that this doesn’t become all about self promotion, I’d be interested in hearing your opinions on interactive digital media. I’ve tried to explain it here the best I can, yet the only way to see if it sticks is to throw it at people. Written from a developer angle, keep that in mind.

Cheers.

Because games don't always have to be about shooting things, the first 2018 Kajam is about telling Stories! Explore how to tell a nice and engaging story to your players, maybe by focusing on developing interesting choices, or on the attachment to the characters, or simply use this excuse to finally try and tell a story for your first time!

While every single type of video game can be greatly affected by its storytelling, here are cheap ways you could exercise your talents:

• Interactive fictions, with an engine like Twine or even from scratch (web or console) ;
• Role-playing games based on RPG Maker or its free clone RPG Boss ;
• Walking simulators, either in 2D or 3D.

Schedule

• Jan. 1st - Jan. 28th: The jam. Make a small game while focusing on its story elements. Either over an evening or spanning the whole 3/4 weeks, either solo or as a team, there's little to no rules, just a chance to practice. If you're curious though, feel free to check the event rules.
• Jan. 28th - Feb. 4th: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate the storytelling of the other games. Like on the first event: no Overall ratings, it's all about how much you liked the stories.
• Feb. 4th: Results are released!

Don't forget to share tips & progress reports with the community throughout the month. Have fun!

Resources

• Story - What is it good for? by Thomas Grip
• Telling tales: The art of narrative in games by Craig Chapple
• Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative by Alexander M. Freed
• Storytelling Tips: How To Plan Big Plot Twists in 4 Steps by Guy Hasson
• Play me a story: How video game storytelling has evolved by Seamus Byrne
• A brief history of the “walking simulator,” gaming’s most detested genre by Nicole Clark
• Exploring Telltale Games’ master plan to evolve modern storytelling by Adam Rosenberg
• The Future of Video Game storytelling by Neil Druckmann

If you have a link to add, please share it in the comments.

So the 2nd Kajam is over, and I'm very happy with the result (and we won, sort of)!

This was a very busy month for me, but fortunately I was working with some very talented individuals. They deserve most of the credit as I only managed to push a small amount of code and a couple of level designs.

I think the game is pretty fun, despite the simple gameplay. The music & SFX are great (albeit lodged in my head forever), and everything fits together nicely. There are also some brilliant touches which I would never have thought of myself, like the cat, which give the game character.

Given more time, I think we could have benefited from adding some hazardous items (e.g. spikes) for more varied gameplay, and perhaps some animations for the player in particular. But then, the lack of animation works quite well with the retro theme, and the game doesn't really feel like it's lacking. More probably we just chose a very realistic set of features for a game jam, and executed them quite well.

I learned a few things from working with wan, too: how useful a design document can be; how to pick a simple idea and do a good job (I quite often fail to complete something because it's too complicated); and how to drive something through to completion.

Overall I'm chuffed with the result and proud to have been involved :D

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.