The Kajam is live! Let's work on some awesome multiplayer games!

The Kajam will run until 2021-06-04. On 2021-06-05 we will have a common gaming session in the Alakajam Discord. You can of course also join for the gaming session if you did not participate in this Kajam.

Tell your story

Are you working solo or in a team? Do you plan to work only on specific weekends or throughout the complete time of the jam? What are the tools you are using? It would also be awesome to hear about the issues you encounter during the Kajam and especially how you solve them? Are you using lockstep or some kind of interpolation?
And most importantly: What game are you making? Did you pick a round based gameplay? Some strategy or some fase paced action gameplay?

New to the jam?

Check out the original jam announcement here

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

The Theme for this Kajam is “Remote Multiplayer”. This relaxed, month-long event will start on 2021-05-07 and last until 2021-06-04. There will be no ratings after the jam, but a dedicated gaming session on 2021-06-05.

Please find the keynote on YouTube and SoundCloud

What does “remote multiplayer” mean?

By definition multiplayer means that more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Remote means that you can play together over some sort of network and that you don’t have to sit next to each other.

What might sound as a daunting endeavour, is the chance to start thinking about games you would normally not do on a GameJam. Most GameJam entries specialize on gameplay mechanics for one player or are dedicated couch multiplayer games.
However in the time of continuing lockdowns when you can not meet with your friends as you would normally do, multiplayer games are a great way to spend some time together.

This Kajam is all about multiplayer.
Let’s learn about the technical details of multiplayer games, like network protocols and client/server communication!
Let’s make a game that you would normally never try on any GameJam!
And most importantly: Let’s have some fun while creating and playing multiplayer games together!

What are the rules?

For this Kajam you can work solo or as a team.
You have four weeks to create and submit your entry, starting on Friday, 2021-05-07 and lasting until Saturday 2021-06-05.
Every Language, Framework or Engine is allowed.
You can use third party assets and are even allowed to add multiplayer functionality to an already finished game!

Detailed rules here

Now, start your engines and join this Kajam!

What is a Kajam?

Kajam competitions are month-long events in which people make a small video game focusing on a specific aspect of game development. They're a perfect opportunity to learn, experiment and level-up your gamedev skills!

This gaming session sounds great! How can I join?

Thank you! The gaming session will happen after the Kajam on Saturday 2021-06-05. We will meet online at the Alakajam! Discord server and have fun playing the games which were created during the jam and have a great time together.

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!

I just finished a video that covers and explains the development of Wandering Soul from the top level!

Didn't make it up in time for the 48hr deadline, but at least uploaded for the Unranked section. Although I think I must have accidentally set it up as Solo and now I can't change it, maybe Monsieur Admin can help me set it to unranked as it should be please :) ?

I feel like I should post something about lessons learned, but I make the same mistakes every jam so lets not pretend next time will be any different.

• Used the less than most stable version of Unity that gave me no benefits and might have wasted a bit of time wondering why setting the font sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

• Spent too long drawing pixel art tilesets that didn't actually work anyway, too much time drawing assets that are hardly ever seen and not enough time with the ones that fill the screen like 95% of the time.

• Gameplay is not that interesting, didn't worry too much about combat not being that exciting because I thought "ah its not really about the combat" but actually didn't have time to add that non combat stuff anyway, so it sort of is about combat, but either way if you have a mechanic you might as well make it as interesting as it can be, and if I had spent more time play testing earlier I might have realised there was some quite easy stuff I could have done to make it more strategic and interesting.

Anyway next week starts the 7 Day Roguelike so maybe I'll make a sequel for that and expand it with some more interesting mechanics and maybe even procedural levels.. sounds like a stretch already.

Anyway despite all the usual issues I still had a lot of fun making a thing

P.S I'm still working on the previous raycasting jam too ….if that ever gets to be playable I'll post a link.

Hello everyone!

I thought I would share how it was like to make Submerged. During the theme submitting phase, we had talked amongst ourselves to find out what we wanted to create. Turns out, one of us wanted to go cave exploring, one wanted aliens, another one wanted a mermaid fairy paradise, and the last one wanted to create a game about linguistics. I am not going to lie, I thought we were doomed. BUT turns out, Ancient Ruins was the perfect theme to create an alien mermaid underwater cave diving adventure centered on merm-alien culture! Who knew?
We hadn't put much thought into what our gameplay would be like beyond this desire to create a game that had a little bit of what we all loved and was centered around exploring , so we analysed our strengths. We had two team members who had jammed before (Hekkusu and myself) and two newcomers who are from other fields but had an interest in dabbling in game development. So we put our strenghths to work!
I programmed, did the sound design, and worked on scenery.
Hekkusu was our main animator and character artists, making portraits, enemys, our character (and pet!).
Louise7 was a first time jammer and created a beautiful storyline for our game, made a script for every bit of dialogue!
and Shooliagods, also a newcomer, managed to make our UI/UX clean and beautiful, making portrait frames, small pixel details (all the bubbles!!) that brought everything together.

***So this post is an encouragement to everyone who is not a dev, you can do it! You too can jam! ***
So congratulations to all the first time jammers, I hope you are proud of what you accomplished!
I know we are <3

TREASURES is a rouge-lite platformer where you collect treasure and then return to the surface. While at first this game seems to be simple, it actually has a high skill cap. Here are some tips and tricks to help you collect more treasure and get better at the game.

1.Wall Climbing. If you are stuck in a place that seems you can't get out of, try wall climbing. Move either left or right, jump(space) and press J, you will grab onto the wall and stay there until you jump or press J again. Now while you are on the wall repeat the steps again and you will scale the wall like it's nothing (just make sure to time your wall jumps).

2.Rare treasure. There are three different rarities common, uncommon, and rare chests. When you are looking around for treasure, if you see this one then something expensive will be inside! https://im.ezgif.com/tmp/ezgif-1-d45e583bc1e5-jpg/ezgif-frame-001.jpg

3.Hidden Treasure. When you encounter one of the tents or huts make sure to go near it because a treasure could be hiding behind it.
Sometimes treasure spawns behind tents or huts so keep an eye out for them.

4.Head Up to the Surface When You Have Low Health. When you are descending in to the lower levels of the cave make sure you keep track of your health, spikes, creatures and even falling could end your run! So be wise and make a descision to go up before it's too late.

5.Make Wise Descisions on what you are carrying. When you find some treasure take a little time to think "Is it worth it to pick this up". Remember you only have twelve slots before you can't collect anymore treasure, so make sure you know what treasure you're picking up so you don't run out of space when you find rare treasure.

6.Better treasure. The deeper you go you will find better and more expensive treasure but you will also find more creatures so make sure you are ready for it.

Thank you for reading this post. If you have any questions about TREASURES, feel free reply and ask.
The game https://alakajam.com/11th-alakajam/1089/treasures/