Hello Alakajammers!

Over the last month or so, we have been busy working "behind the scenes", submitting the appropriate applications to make Alakajam an NPO: a non-profit organisation.

Why a non-profit?

I wanted to try to explain why this matters to you all.

Initially, Alakajam was @wan's one-man project to set up a new site for running jams and creating a gamedev community. It was set up to be open source so that anyone can contribute, with a modern design and architecture.

Another goal from the get-go was to make the site in such a way that makes it easy for different people to run a jam, to help moderate and even fix the website when needed. Crucially, we wanted the community to maintain and run the site, with no single keymaster and single point of failure.

And this is where the NPO comes in. Alakajam is now an actual organisation, run by an elected board with transparent processes, finances and activities. Anyone who is interested can help out and contribute in various ways.

The Council of Jamicians

The initial organisation has been set up, and the starting elected officers are (for a period of one year):

• Scribe: @dollarone
• Master of coin, Lead developer: @wan
• Counselor, "Master of designs": @Aurel300
• Counselor, "Lord": @toasty
• Counselor, "Doctor": @Laguna

After a year, there will be a board meeting and an election, where anyone can nominate themselves for a role.

The sole reason for filing all this paperwork is that so Alakajam can be a community-owned site which can survive even if its founder decide to completely remove themselves from the process.

Hopefully Alakajam will continue on for many years and jams to come - as long as its community want it to run!

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ALAKAJAM!
Registered in France on 11 August 2018, as an "association loi 1901"
RNA Number W691095617

August is pretty hectic for gamejams! I want to Kajam, I want to do js13k again, there's LD and there's LowRezJam and A Game By Its Cover.

There are probably even more, but wow, that's a lot. I don't need to do all of them, but then I had an idea: maybe I can combine some of them? Especially with this theme, I should be able to join the Kajam and the LowRezJam! Maybe I can even find a cover for the name?

With this in mind, I started on an idea for my belated entry to yesterday's onehourgamejam. I went with the LowRezJam's resolution requirement, and used PICO-8 for that retro-feel.

In a couple of hours I have a prototype, which I think I will extend and submit for the Kajam and LowRezJam! It's pretty basic right now, but you can play it and win or just set things on fire: Wildfire

The idea is to extinguish fires with whatever tools you have at hand. I think if I make it turn-based it can become a nice little puzzler :)

The 3rd Alakajam! is over and that means my duties as its host are over.

I wanted to just quickly go over what is required for running a jam, and why you might consider volunteering!

In terms of duties, it's pretty simple, and there is a document with all the steps written down so you can easily prepare for what is needed when. There is an event admin menu on the website itself where you can control which post is pinned, what the current countdown is for, and what the status of the ongoing jam is. It's all rather nicely setup - you don't need to ssh into a box somewhere and run scripts or mess with databases.

The important thing is that Alakajam was set up to be a nice gamedev/gamejam community, with emphasis on that last word. In order to be exactly that, we need to not have a dependency on a single person, and we need to make it easy for other people to get involved. You may not care who makes the site tick as long as it does, but I think it's crucial that we run the site and its jams as a community - which is why I'm writing this post! So if you think it would be fun to spend some of your time running an Alakajam or a Kajam - get involved! Talking to the regulars on #alakajam on irc is a good starting point!

Additionally - if it wasn't already obvious, anyone can get involved with the development of the site itself - just check out the site repo and start committing - there are a bunch of issues that specify missing features and bugs (look for the "good first issue" flag if you're new!).

Congratulations one last time to everyone who entered the 3rd Alakajam! You can discover the best rated games of the jam here:

Solo winners | Team winners

High fives to everyone who took part in this fun event, whether by submitting games, joining the theme submissions, rating games and most of all giving valuable feedback to others :)

We hope you enjoyed the jam!

Next Events

4th Alakajam: 12-14 October 2018

5th Kajam: August 1st to August 30th hosted by @Laguna (What is a Kajam?)

Behind the Scenes

Thanks to all the people who made this event possible:

• @wan and @toasty for helping me run the event and the Twitter account
• @aurel and @danaeplays for the wonderful launch stream
• All 10 contributors to the website source code (proudly made in NodeJS!)
• All the streamers, youtubers and speedrunners who covered the event :)
• And of course, all of you in the community - without you there is no jam!

We hope to see you back for more jamming on future events!

There's only one week left to play and rate games! On July 8th at 7pm UTC, the ratings will be counted and the top 3 of the solo and team categories will be crowned!

In order to make as many games as possible receive a rating, games are now displayed in "rescue mode" which means games that need ratings will be displayed at the top!

Help your fellow Alakajam community members out and play and rate some of these games! Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve your game design skills, so let's make as many games as possible get some feedback!

Let's rescue some games!

That's it, all the games are in - well done everyone! Now it's time to play and rate each other's games!

Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve your game design skills, so please dish it out in buckets. If you haven't submitted a game yourself, you can still play games and leave feedback, the only thing you'll miss is the ability to rate games - so please do play and comment everyone!

The voting phase lasts until July 8th, when the ratings will be counted and the top 3 of the solo and team categories will be crowned!

Go go go! Play and rate games!

Just a few hours left! And we have made lots of progress but still so much to do!

But we have a map and a screenshot:

Status update from the unironically self-named "super" team.

We are making an age of empires/warcraft/FTL/starcraft/loads more inspired thing where the jungle/nature is getting back at humanity and eating their cities. Your goal is to try to fend off the impending doom for as long as possible.

It's currently set to be a mix of tower defense with base building and maintenance, and we have a ton of ideas outside the "mvp" scope that we're dying to add (I want BOSSES!!).

We're a team based in different timezones - @toasty and I are coach-coding in the UK, while the sound department - @gsamaro and @Kyle3wynn - are composing in California, and at the same time @James_Deans_Jeans is making the graphics in Toronto.

This is challenging in some ways, but it also means work is being done while we sleep here in the UK. I'm looking forward to waking up and putting all the assets in the game! Hopefully we can add a screenshot tomorrow morning - watch this space…

The 3rd Alakajam has started! Let's get cracking!

Submission

The deadline depends on whether you want to enter the ranked or unranked category:

• ranked: June 24th 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 48 hours
• unranked: June 25th 9:00pm UTC, which means you have a bit more than 72 hours

For both categories, you have one additional hour to submit your game.

We all enjoyed the awesome opening ceremony created by @Aurel300 and @DanaePlays . If you missed it, you can still find it at Danae's Twitch channel.

And the theme is Always growing!

Lots of things are always growing…

Cool things to do during the jam

• Write blog posts: share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of #gamedevfood or gifs of gameplay (or cute animals!)
• Follow the Alakajam Twitter account and tweet about #alakajam
• Check out the streams and videos

Most importantly: have fun! Good luck!

It's finally here - the day when the 3rd Alakajam kicks off!

In just four hours, the theme of the jam will be revealed. Building up to this grand revelation, we will gradually get rid of the other themes - one by one - and you can follow along on twitch from 6:20 pm UTC with DanaePlays and Aurel300! Special guests are wan and myself, and there will be opportunity to interact from the twitch chat, including winning some fresh Alakajam goodies!

Join us at 6:20pm UTC for the final countdown towards the theme revelation!