So I started off with this (Friday)

(click the gif for better quality)

And continued with this (Sunday)

(click the gif for better quality)

And here I am now (Wednesday / Thursday night)

(click the gif for better quality)

For my Kajam entry, I have decided to go with a top-down, twin-stick shooter. That should give me plenty of opportunities for finetuning the game feel and juicing up the action!

For my last MiniLD entry I tried the exercise of making a whole game design document before coding the game. Even if the actual game was quite small, it was fun writing the doc, and I think it helped keep the development focused and the end result consistent.

I won't do a full GDD this time but still, here's my notes on the upcoming entry:

Design notes

Theme/Art style

• Game set in a strange, futuristic place that feels like a maze made out of hundreds of similar rooms arranged as a grid, with straight corridors in-between them.
• Top-down view with either a pixel-art style (like Hotline Miami except simpler), or a smoother look with simplistic art like Prison Architect. In both cases it will be simple and in full 2D.
• Setting & atmosphere largely inspired by the Cube movie

Gameplay loop

1. Enter a room.
2. The room locks up and something happens randomly: you get loot, or robot enemies appear. Maybe both. Maybe nothing.
3. Kill the enemies until there is none.
4. The room unlocks.
5. (Optional) You see a clue about where the exit of the maze is.
6. You pick one of the 4 directions, enter a corridor to the next room.
7. Repeat.

The goal is to survive while finding the exit. I have a cool idea in mind for the ending, but I don't know if I'll have the time to implement it… If not I'll just make the difficulty ramp up until the player dies :)

Loot

• 1st room after the one you spawn in will always let you find a weapon dropped by a dead robot
• Health
• Maybe ammo (if so I should give the player a way to attack if out of ammo, e.g. by throwing his weapon)
• Maybe a 2nd weapon to have one in each hand
• Maybe maybe, some bonuses to improve the weapon

The problem

The jam was good, but the rating system left me cold. I have a total of three issues with it; let's see if you can spot them.

10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

It is obvious right? Ok, I'll give you the first one for free: there are no descriptive words to go with the numbers. Let's fix that.

10 The best ever
9 Amazing
8 Great
7 Good
6 Above average
5 Below average
4 Bad
3 Terrible
2 Abysmal
1 The worst ever

Better. Now everyone has similar expectations of each grade, more so than before. Do keep in mind this is just an example, there are other fitting descriptions and they could even change based on each category.

Second problem? There is no average! In a big jam there are a whole lot of average entries, so-so stuff. With this rating system I'll have to score them slightly better or slightly worse every time. How annoying.

The last problem is more personal than the prior two. In my opinion a scale of 10 has too much granularity. What is the difference between Amazing and Great? How about Terrible and Abysmal? It is not clear and as such we can expect different people to use these grades in fuzzy ways, which muddles the results. In the best case scenario the grade should reflect the (hopefully written) opinions of each reviewer exactly, not close enough.

Suggestions

In light of the prior explanations some propositions are in order. The first one is obvious, simply introduce descriptive words and an average grade to the current system. I'd be fine with that. Next, two more ideas.

7-grade, zero centered model

+3 Amazing
+2 Good
+1 Above average
0 Average
-1 Below average
-2 Bad
-3 Terrible

The old 5-grade model

5 Amazing
4 Good
3 Average
2 Bad
1 Terrible

Conclusions

I rate the rating system 2 out of 5, bad.

Cheers

I'm working out the pixel art style for my entry right now. I have a pretty basic tileset already. ^-^

I don't want to flood the front page, so I'll just keep editing this post for now. I managed to get some free time to finish up the tileset. It looks a bit sloppy, but the level design should make it look a bit cleaner.

Particles! Tweens! Screen shakes! Flashes and explosions!

For the 1st monthly Kajam, your mission – if you accept it – is to make a small game and push its juiciness to 11, by adding all these little details that make a core gameplay super satisfying.

That includes not only visual & audio feedback but also, gameplay-wise, how tight and clear the controls are – in particular for action-oriented games. See the bottom of the post for a list of resources!

Schedule

• Oct. 13th - Nov. 19th: The jam. You have around one month to work on your 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.
• Nov. 19th - Nov. 26th: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate how juicy the other games are – and that's it: no Overall, no Originality ratings, just Juiciness!
• Nov. 26th: The definitive rankings of the most juicy games are announced :)

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

Resources

Videos

• Juice it or lose it by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho (see also their Juicy Breakout demo game)
• The art of screenshake by Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman
• Secrets of Game Feel and Juice | Game Maker's Toolkit by Mark Brown
• Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks by Nicolae Berbece
• Mechanically Speaking series by [game array]
• Super Mario World Camera Logic Review by Shaun Inman

Articles

• Squeezing more juice out of your game design! by Nathan Lovato
• Game Feel: The Secret Ingredient by Steve Swink
• Pushing Buttons by Mick West (Cowboy Programming)
• Game feel Wikipedia article

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

I have only ever done jams and compos that last for 48 - 72 hours. But I'm really loving the way Alakajam is coming along, so I figure I shoud give this month-long jam thing a try.

Usually I'm coding like crazy during a jam to make the game as feature-packed as possible. Unfortunately that often results in a buggy mess. So this time I'm trying to focus on delivering a polished experience.

This is how shiny my puzzle will be

The game won't be super innovative or complex but the menus will make you weep for joy! So, without further ado, here's my plan for the 1st Kajam:

Plan

I'm going to make a puzzle game because it's what I'm most comfortable with.

First week

• Make it playable
• Create at least five levels

Second Week

• Force a friend to play-test
• Implement suggestions / features from their feedback

Third week

• Create more levels
• Write music
• Create sound effects

Fourth week

• Polish the UI / user experience like crazy
• Create more levels if there's time

Fifth week

• Test rigorously and fix bugs
• Polish the music & sfx
• Create more levels if there's time

Congrats to all who participated the 1st Alakajam!

So I got a lot of feedbacks concerning the super difficult and unfriendly mechanics of WuXing Rush. The gameplay rating of the game is not good as well. Therefore I took like a week to re-design the whole mechanics, trying to make the game easy to learn but still challenging, and worked out a few new mechanics for testing.

In the GIF above you can see I repainted the main character and his animations. It now takes only one element (or essence as I prefer) as the 'core essence' for certain potion. There are up to 2 enhancers can be used for a single potion, in order to activate additional enhancements. Different essences work differently as enhancers with each core essence, and some essences are exclusive from others. In general, it becomes easier to decide what essence to choose, and you don't have to choose 3 ingredients before tossing a potion.

Another improvement inspired by @HuvaaKoodia is that the tree bridge now finds its own growing path. So the timing of using a tree bridge potion becomes less essential. I'm also considering to make the tree bridge more flexible (like not only to climb but also to cross water area) and more useful (like you can regenerate HP by walking on it). I'm glad there are just so many possibilities.

Hopefully someone interests in this developing game and I'll post updates whenever there is noticeable progress. ;)
Cheers!

The post jam version of A Strange Package is coming along quite nice. A new coat of paint on the graphics of the game and (finally!) choices have been implemented in the game! If everything goes according to plans, the game will be completed this Sunday.

Missing Alakajam! already? Fear not! In-between the main competitions we will run longer, more relaxed events. Kajams are month-long jams where the goal is to practice a specific aspect of game making.

The theme of each Kajam will not be elected by votes, but instead chosen by a host picked every month. For this first month I will be that host, announcing the topic on October 13th! (UTC evening). If you're interested in the topic, you'll have a whole month to work on a small game and submit it to the competition.

Detailed Kajam rules

So the first Alakajam! is over and for those of you who enjoy data and visualisations, I've made some graphs!

Categories

Let's start with something simple, but certainly important – which categories are the most important for a good result overall? Here is the correlation table of the six categories:

It seems that Gameplay is the most important for a good Overall result, which makes sense. Audio and Graphics correlate less, so good games with terrible graphics and bad games with amazing graphics are both conceivable. Also note that all the values in the table are quite high (values less than 0.5 would indicate negative correlation). In other words, a "good" game will usually get better ratings in all categories, a "bad" game will get worse ratings in all categories most of the time. More on this later.

Next up, category averages by rating:

This probably tells us more about our voting preferences than the games themselves – people rate games high in Graphics more often, while they are more critical of Gameplay, the actual experience and fun of the game.

What about the best / worst categories for ranked games?

Note that there were no games where Overall was the best or worst rating-wise. It is common to rate the game in Overall somewhat close to the average of the five other categories, so this is not a complete surprise.

Votes

Let's look at votes a bit more. These are the counts for each rating value:

This looks like a nice bell curve, though it is skewed somewhat towards 7, as opposed to the true middle of 5.5. We can also guess there are some psychological gaps between giving a game an 8 and giving it a 9. Similar gaps are then 4–5, and 2–3. 2 probably seems extremely harsh to many people, so they'd rather shift their vote slightly towards a 3.

This "spread" is the difference between the lowest and highest rating given to a game in any category. This partly explains the fact that a "good" game more likely gets high ratings in all categories mentioned above.

Popularity

Now let's see whether a game's results are at least somewhat predictable based on its popularity, measured in the number of received ratings:

Interestingly enough, there are quite a few games which ended up very high, despite being quite close to the minimum required votes (10). Some teams / developers may have forgotten about Alakajam! after submitting their games! Let's look at the same graphs, but this time measuring the number of received comments instead of ratings:

Once again not a super clear trend – we can only potentially observe that getting more than ~ 17 comments on your game means you are likely ending up in the top 40%. This may very well be within a statistical error, so until Alakajam! grows a lot and we can get better data, don't depend on this!

Voting days

And finally, let's have a look at when and how people voted. The rating period was exactly 14 days. We can see how many votes were cast on each day:

The first day (first 24 hours) was when most people did their voting. The spike on the third day may have been people coming back to AKJ after resting for some time. There is a minor spike on the Saturday of the second day. The results hype attracted the last spike. 40 or so of these votes were from our stream with Danae though!

And finally, I was interested in whether or not the voting averages differed over the days:

Although there is quite a sizable difference (1.26) between the voting average of the fifth day and the eleventh day, I am not sure how statistically significant this is, as there were not so many votes cast on those days. A possible factor could have been that entries which get rated later on more likely need to be "rescued", because their teams forgot to rate other entries. This, in turn, may have been because the teams weren't very happy with their own games. But that is just wild speculation at this point!

Nonetheless, I hope you found these graphs interesting. Stay tuned for the next ones :)