@BalBoom, @Thrainsa and I will be back this week-end for a small 3D game! We'll be making our entry using Unity & Blender, and hopefully I can find enough time to work on sound & music using Reason.

Here's our last couple entries from 2020 in case anyone remembers playing them :)

 

With the theme now revealed, the 13th Alakajam! has started. Let's make games :)

If you're entering the competitive, ranked jam, and are unsure what you're allowed to do, please check this page for the detailed rules of the jam (in particular the "What is allowed?" section).

Submission times

The end of the jam is depending on whether you pick ranked or unranked. You can create your game page at any time during the jam (and update it any time after it's created):

• Ranked: September 19th 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 48 hours (+1 hour for late entries to create their page).
• Unranked: September 20th 10:00pm UTC, which means you have a bit more than 72 hours.

Big thanks to @DanaePlays and @Aurel300 for hosting the awesome launch stream! If you missed it, you can still find it on her Twitch channel.

Cool things to do during the jam

• Write a blog post: Share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of food or gifs of cute animals. You can also free to use posts for advertising live jam streams.
• Tweet about #alakajam and follow the alakajam Twitter account
• Initialize your game page early!

Have a nice week-end all of you, and see you on the other side!

The 13th edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday September 17th!

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
September 3, 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
September 10, 7pm UTC	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
September 17, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
September 19, 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.
September 20,10pm 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.
October 3, 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 ;)

The next edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday June 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
June 11, 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
June 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.
June 25, 6pm UTC	Countdown stream	An official stream is held on Twitch to launch the event! Cancelled?
June 25, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
June 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.
June 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.
July 11, 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 ;)

This is a living list, gathering links suggested by the community. Please share your recommendations in the comments section or Discord, I'll update this post accordingly. Thanks!

General purpose

• What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking
• Making a Multiplayer FPS in C++: Series of articles about designing the networking for multiplayer games. The examples are in C++ but the solutions can be adapted to other languages.

Unity

• Mirror (Docs, Pong example): Free Networking API designed to be ease of use, it reportedly has a good reputation.

• Mirage: An allegedly improved fork of Mirror, with more features

• Photon Bolt (Official tutorial): Offers cloud hosting for game servers, with a free plan that is more than enough for a jam game.

• Forge Networking Remastered

• Article: Choosing the right netcode for your game (compares MLAPI, DarkRift 2, Photon PUN, Photon Quantum 2.0 & Mirror)

C/C++

• Beej's guide to network programming: A popular and thorough introduction to networking in C
• Curated list of networking resources for C

It's official: the results for the 11th Alakajam! are out! You can find the results below.

Solo winners | Team winners | Unranked games

A huge THANK YOU to all of you who took the time to recreate their game page, and most of all to replay ratings (sometimes even comments) on the games you played. Thanks to our collective efforts, pretty much every ranked game having its page restored has managed to get ratings! The past few days have been a bit strange, but in the end the event could be completed normally which is the best outcome we could expect.

Well, other than, say, servers not burning to ashes :,-)

Final words on the lost data

If, for some reason, you've been away from Alakajam for the past 10 days and can't find your game/user account anymore, please check this page for context. Game submissions will remain open for the unranked division for a while, in case any of the users behind the dozen of games that weren't recovered decide to recreate their game page.

I hope to eventually make a postmortem of the past events as a blog post, with some advice to everyone on how to set up reliable backups that prevent the scenario we got.

Upcoming events

• The 12th Alakajam! will take place on the 25-27 June 2021 week-end!
• Before that, a new Kajam should be held as a less competitive, more relaxed event to practice gamedev. Details have yet to be announced.

Thanks for being part of the 11h Alakajam, we hope you had a nice time, and look forward to the 12th! See you soon <3

11th Alakajam data wipe

In case you missed it on Wednesday, the Alakajam server has been involved in an actual fire, impacting a lot of servers from French company OVH. The company has confirmed to us today that the server will not be recoverable. The version of the website you are currently browsing has been restored from a backup dating back to February 20th. That is, one week before the jam.

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️
If you created your Alakajam user account after February 20th, your whole account, game submission, ratings and blog posts are unfortunately lost(*). If your account has been created before that date, some data (game submission, posts, comments) may have been already restored.
⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️

We're sorry about the troubles, and wish we anticipated this kind of disaster scenario better. At least know that the new server is already subject to a weekly offsite backup… Of course, everyone can still get back on board :)

(*) All blog posts are available in the Google Cache, as well as a majority of game pages. You can access a handy archive dumping all found pages here.

Bonus round for submissions & ratings

As an entrant to the 11th Alakajam, you are invited to:

• Recreate your user account if needed ;
• Resubmit your game (unless you still see it in your account, which means we could recover it from the Google cache - except some details like high score settings) ;
• Re-cast the ratings of the games you have already played ;
• And of course continue rating more games and exchanging feedback at will, until the end of the ratings phase.

To give everyone a better chance to get ratings again, and a ranking at the end of the jam, we have made the following changes:

• The end of the ratings phase has been extended to Sunday March 21st ;
• Game submissions will remain open until then ;
• The minimum number of ratings has been lowered a bit ;
• Casting ratings has been open to everyone, not only jam entrants.

Happy playing!

On March 10th, at around 1am a fire started at a site of our hosting provider, which includes Alakajam's server. While we wait for the hosting company to resolve the issue (which is planned to take up to next Monday), we have set up this Alakajam install, from our last backup, on a completely new machine.

On top of this incident, we have made the mistake of not setting up automatic off-site backups for Alakajam. As you can see from the game submissions being missing from the site, our last backup was made before the 11th Alakajam week-end. We don't know for sure whether data has been lost in the fire or not, so in the meantime we chose to freeze the website.

Note: in the picture, Alakajam is somewhere in the small building on the right of the burning one. As it turns out, virtual servers are… not that virtual. (14/03 EDIT: In the end we turned out to be in the fully burnt building)

About 11th Alakajam's rating phase

Here's our current plans for next week:

• Plan A: We recover the game submissions & ratings. If so we'll restore the up-to-date version of the site, everything goes back to normal, and we'll give an additional week to end the ratings phase normally.
• Plan B: If data really is lost, we'll reopen BOTH entry submissions and ratings, for long enough to let everyone jump back aboard and re-cast ratings to the games they played.

Thanks for your understanding. Let this be a lesson for us all to never underestimate backups!

How ratings work

For the next two weeks, all entrants are able to give ratings on other games. Take some time to play & rate games, and even better, write some feedback about it! Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve one's game design skills, so please dish it out in buckets. While people who didn't enter the event cannot rate games, they can still post reviews.

By rating & commenting (even on Unranked entries), you will gain Karma that makes your game more visible to others. A high Karma gives you more chances to get ratings yourself and reach the minimum of 10 to be classified. Otherwise, you will not get a final ranking!

Ancient Mushroom Award

Original announcement here

The ANCIENT MUSHROOM AWARD can be given by anyone, to anyone during the ratings phase. When you see a game that makes worthy use of MUSHROOMS, simply paste the badge picture into a comment for the award to be counted. At the end of the jam, we'll tally the amount of given awards… and nominate the ANCIENT MUSHROOM KINGS :D

Code to copy:

![](https://i.imgur.com/tPAx0I4.png>

End of ratings

On March 14th, at 7pm UTC the final results will be released and the winners crowned :)

Go go go! Play and rate games!

A faction of gamedevs has decided to show their passion for the Mushrooms theme, and integrate it into their games anyway. So let's give everyone an additional (an totally optional) incentive to put mushrooms in here some way or another!

The ANCIENT MUSHROOM AWARD can be given by anyone, to anyone during the ratings phase. When you see a game that deserves it, simply paste the badge picture into a comment for the award to be counted.

At the end of the jam, we'll tally the amount of given awards… and nominate the ANCIENT MUSHROOM KINGS :D

Award giving kit

• Badge markup for giving the award

  ![](https://i.imgur.com/tPAx0I4.png>

• Pics

Looking forward to see your games! Don't forget to take breaks and have a decent night of sleep :)