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.

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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.
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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/

Play Wandering Soul Here

'Tis a hard game. I'd advise not playing it if you aren't comfortable with bullet hells. lol

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!

Mid-jam I feared that I won't have anything remotely playable, but in the end I was able to submit something.

What went well

• The scope was rather well chosen all things considered. Fortunately I was able to shave off a lot of features that I have initially planned, without compromising the core gameplay too much.
• I was very pleased to discover the pixel tool in Affinity Photo.
• Choice of a 12x12 tiny block size helped a lot, since this was my first foray into pixel art after two decades.
• Love2d was great to use, I didn't have any hickups.
• Somehow I managed to retain a normal sleep schedule.

What went poorly

• I have realized way too late that my logic for making pieces fall after explosion is wrong. This makes the game harder than intended.
• I've spent too much time animating the conveyor belt, when I realized I could have had it done in a few minutes.
• The controls are not well explained and somewhat unintuitive, they require more work. This is similar to my previous game, so definitely something to work at.
• Too much time wasted just playing around with the game rather than coding.

What's next
I'd like to continue working on this one a bit. There are so many features that the game is missing:

• Music and sound.
• Actual puzzles, requiring some planning.
• More levels.
• Crawling, jumping, falling…

Some of the features I wanted to have in the original game. In my head the game should have looked much more like ancient ruins, in the current version one has to squint quite a bit to find the theme.

• Sand tiles that always spill over.
• Buttons and doors.
• Water and water bricks.
• Traps.

Can you restore the Сolosseum from its ruins?