The stars have aligned!
Humble contestants: The time is nigh for an epic battle of the highest highscores, the fastest runs and the smartest strategies.

For the upcoming 7th Alakajam Tournament to become a festival of honor, great achievements and awesome e-sportsmanship, we have spared no effort to bring you the finest selection of prizes for the noble winners.

We will have a pool of prizes from which the winners can select. The first place gets the first pick from the pool, second place the second pick and so on.

Remember, the Tournament will start on 2022-03-25, so warm up your gamepads, train your aim and relax those thumb-muscles,

Let's talk prizes

The prizes are of course all gamedev related

• Blood Sweat and Pixels by Jason Schreier
• Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester
• Level Up! by Scott Rogers

It's official: the results for the 14th Alakajam! are out! You can find the results below.

Solo winners | Team winners | Unranked games

A big congratulation to all the winners!

And of course a huge THANK YOU to everyone who took part in the 14th Alakajam! It was an awesome event thanks to you! We hope you had an awesome time creating, playing, rating and commenting on cool videogames! Thanks for being a part of this!

Behind the scenes

Of course this event is not run by a single person. Thanks to

• @Raindrinker for doing the most work behind the scenes
• @wan for doing awesome work on the website
• @Aurel300 and @DanaePlays for the extraordinary opening stream on Twitch
• @BloodyOrange for playing all the games on Twitch

Upcoming events

The next event will be the 7th Alakajam Tournament, which will start on 2022-03-25. There will soon be some more announcements, regarding the prizes (yes, there will be prizes!) and the games to be played. I can say already now that we will have quite a diverse selection of finest Alakajam games ready for you to compete in thrilling highscore battles!

After the Tournament the next events are

• The 12th Kajam in late April
• The 15th Alakajam in June

Great news! The next AKJ tournament is coming up!

How it works

For two weeks, starting on Friday 2022-03-25 at 7pm and until Sunday 2022-04-10 7pm, everyone is invited to play and post high scores on a selection of games from the 14th Alakajam and other gamejams. Using screenshots as proof, players can compete in those games' leaderboards for points.

For each game, players are awarded a number of points for being in the top 10, as per the table below. The players with the highest total scores are shown on a global leaderboard throughout, and at the end we'll announce the winner and runners up.

Check out the previous leaderboard to see the current title holders! :)

I want my game to be part of the AKJ Tournament

If you want your game to be part of the tournament, please comment under this post or contact Laguna (preferably via DM on Discord).

This time, we will join in quite a large group. Our team consists of
Adkiem, Aneira, DiggiPander, Laguna, Thunraz and xxBloodyOrange. So obviously we will submit for the team session. We have worked in the same setup for the FrankenGameJam 2021 and it worked out great there!

For the tools we will use C++ with a custom JamTemplate that allows to deploy on windows, linux and web. Under the hood it uses SFML and SDL. IDEs will be Visual Studio, clion and visual studio code.
For graphics, aseprite will be used and the sound effects and music will be done in Cubase and Garage Band.

So from my side, I wish everybody already good luck and a great time!

Hi everyone!

The 14th Alakajam is coming up on the next weekend! While everyone gets their engines ready and thinks about some concepts for the shortlist themes, there are two important anouncements:

Opening Stream

Before the jam starts, we will have the ever so awesome Opening Stream by @Aurel3000 and @DanaePlays.

• What? Get even more hyped for the 14th Alakajam and join for the shortlist elimination.
• Where? On DanaePlays' Twitch Channel -> Click
• When? One hour prior to the jam -> February 25, 6pm UTC

Upcoming Alakajam Tournament

Closely after the Alakajam ends, the next awesome event will start! This will be the Alakajam Tournament, running from 2022-03-25 to 2022-10-04. You can find some details about it here.
When submitting your game for the 14th Alakajam, you can opt in to have it as a possible candidate for the Tournament. So if you have a highscore to crack, some ingame-timer to beat or some other mechanic to competetively play your game, this is a great opportunity! Make sure to plan ahead and join us on that event!

Preparation for the Jam

But back to the 14th Alakajam: If you are wondering how to prepare for the jam, you can

• Share a "I am in" post here on the website, talking about your team, tools and ideas for the themes (cat pictures are appreciated as well)
• Join the community on discord, follow on Twitter or on reddit
• Take a look at the rules

The 14th edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday February 25th!

As always, the event is about making a game, from nothing, in a weekend. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. If you opt-in to the competition, you will get to be ranked against every other contestant! Or if you prefer a more relaxed setting, the unranked jam will still give you an opportunity to get plays and comments.

Schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
February 11 , 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
February 18, 7pm UTC	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
February 25, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
February 27, 7pm UTC	End of ranked jam	The main competition ends here, exactly 48 hours after the start time. Submissions will remain open for an additional hour after the deadline.
February 28,10pm UTC	End of unranked jam	If you want to go for a relaxed weekend - or need more time - you can create a game in the 72 hours of the unranked jam.
March 13, 7pm UTC	Results	After two weeks during which all entrants are invited to play, rate and comment on other peoples games… The results are released and the winners crowned!

Rules

There are three divisions:

- Solo, in which you make a whole game alone in 48 hours
- Team, in which any number of persons can gather to make a game in 48 hours
- Unranked, a more open division which grants about 72 hours to finish the game. Useful for those not interested in the competitive aspect of the event, want to work on an existing project of theirs, or simply did not finish their game in time.

See the full rules for the Alakajam.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

1. Create an account on this website
2. Publish your game before the deadline

A lot of participants also post an "I am in" blog post presenting themselves or their team before the event. Describe what tools and frameworks and engines you will use to create your awesome game! Which themes do you like? Let us and the community know!

If you can, feel free to spread the word about the jam - the more we are, the merrier! glhf ;)

Hi everyone,

this Saturday (11th December), 20:15 CET BloodyOrange would like to play the games of the feedback fortnight on her twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/oobloodyorangeoo Would be nice if you join. 🙂

Hi there Jammers!

The Deadline for the Kajam is approaching fast. Please submit your games until 2021-06-04 21:00 Berlin time.
Please add some instructions on how to set up your game for multiplayer session (e.g. which ports to forward (udp/tcp) of if specific config files need to be adjusted).

On 2021-06-05 we will have a dedicated gaming session where you are invited to join us in the Alakajam discord "general" voice channel to play all the submissions together. Of course you can also join if you did not participate in the Kajam. We will start at 18:00 Berlin time. Check this website for your local timezone.

So everyone: let's add the finishing touches to our games and then have a great time together. Looking forward to talk to all of you in person.

Hi there,

So there is finally some progress. Not so much on the gameplay side, but the underlying mechanics are getting fleshed out quite nicely.

As we are aiming for a SHMUP game, the client really needs to feel responsive. This will be achieved by some clever client side prediction. This will only roughly be described here. For a full introduction, I recommend you this awesome tutorial here.
Basically the server but also every client runs on it's own pace and a slow client should not block the server or other clients. This means that some sort of lock-step implementation will not work for us.
Due to network lag, the client will always be behind the server and there is basically nothing that could prevent it. The idea is that the client predicts the movement for a certain frame 60. Then it sends out the input state for this frame to the server. Simultaneously the gamestate for frame 55 has arrived (due to network lag this will always lag some frames behind).
The solution now is that the player locally stores the game state as well as the input state for the past frames.
The number of stored input frames as well as the framerate determines what input lags you can compensate.

If a mismatch between the locally computed frame 55 and the received frame 55 from the server is detected, the client code now needs to roll back its simulation to frame 55 and re-simulate the input up to frame 60. This will then be used to display the player position.

To simulate network trouble, you can use a tool like clumsy. This allows to add arbitrary lag, dropped packets, throttle, limited bandwidth or even message corruption to your in or outgoing network packets. It works for ipv4 and ipv6 and supports udp and tcp. This is very handy for testing purposes.

So I am joining the Multiplayer Kajam.

Tools that will be used:

• C++
• My self-written Jam Template, based on SFML
• Visual Studio & Visual Studio Code
• Aseprite for graphics

We will join in a team of three

• Thunraz
• BloodyOrange
• and Laguna

We started yesterday evening and already had some trouble with our ISPs. One was configured to use only IPv4, the other was configured for only IPv6 (with an ipv4 tunnel). We found a way around that, where the only restriction is that I cannot be the host, but we can work around that as local testing is still possible.

I wish everyone best of luck for the jam!