The 4 web games we'll compete on for the next couple weeks are revealed! Featuring the two winners from the last Alakajam, I hope you'll enjoy our selection.

If you've been part of a tournament before, you may have notice a decrease in the number of games: it's an experiment to see how featuring less games may impact event participation.

How the event works

Until April, Sunday 5th, everyone is invited to play and post high scores on our selection of 4 games from the 8th Alakajam. Using screenshots as proof, you 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!

About the ongoing pandemic

Don't worry, this won't be a note saying that "Alakajam will continue its activities despite blah blah", nor a reminder to wash your hands with soap regularly.

With the containment now in place in a lot of countries, it seems like quite some people are fighting with anxiety about the whole situation. To be honest, in my case I'm now a week into containment and I haven't slept that well since it all started. With sudden unemployment (hopefully temporarily), I'm currently spending my days at home with a young kid to entertain and take care of. On the plus side, being a full time parent may keep me too busy and tired to fully realize the situation :P

I would just like to take this chance to remind you that it's perfectly normal to experience stress in this situation, as we're facing a lot of uncertainty with what's going on, and of course what's left to come. Hopefully for a large majority of us this will be remembered as a few months of worry, boredom and maybe a few days of flu. In the meantime I'd just like to share some valuable advice I've found and felt like sharing. If you would like to read more, see this for instance for a more detailed read.

• While it's important to stay informed, don't spend too much time checking the news and social media. I feel those can be a big source of anxiety. Honestly, if you already know how to limit risks of getting infected/infecting others, there's no point in spending all day reading about the virus - nor reading people talk about it on Twitter.
• Stay in touch with family and friends, preferably with actual phone & video calls.
• Put some exercise in your daily activities, and if you have a balcony or private yard, spend time in it.
• Consider looking for ways to help people. Helping includes sharing useful information, clearing up rumors and bad advice that gets spread around, and calming things down when friends & relatives start to panick about stuff.
• Finally, don't forget that there's only so much we can do about the situation. Beyond doing our best to follow local health recommendations, the most valuable skill is just patience.

Best wishes to you all, take care and keep jamming!

I'm sure some of y'all quarantined folks have started polishing your gaming skills, so now is your time to shine. The next AKJ tournament is coming up!

How it works

For two weeks, starting on Friday 20th at 7pm and until April, Sunday 5th, everyone is invited to play and post high scores on a selection of games from the 8th Alakajam. 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! :)

It's official: the results for the 8th Alakajam! are out! You can find the results here:

Solo winners | Team winners

Kudos, high fives and back slaps to everyone who participated, in whatever way(s) you chose to. We hope you had a blast! If you have things to say about the event, feel free to share any feedback on the #headquarters channel of our Discord server.

Upcoming events

The 9th Alakajam! will take place on the 19-21 June 2020 week-end and should be a special event if all goes as planned. Expect a more detailed announcement on the matter soonish :)

Before that, the next event is held in March, and will be a gaming competition called AKJ Tournament. For two weeks, the community will be invited like last time to play & compete on jam games! If you want to submit your own game to the event, make sure you have ticked the "Allow game use for tournament" option in your game page. The moderators will hand pick four games from the list.

Thanks for being part of this fun event, we hope you had a nice time! See you soon <3

For the next two weeks, all entrants are be able to give ratings on other games. Take some time to play & rate games, and even better write some feedback about it! Getting 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 will make 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!

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

Go go go! Play and rate games!

Can I add a timer to my game for high scores after the game is submitted?

After 48 stressful hours our small team manged to finsh DEPTH JUMP, our team's 4th game jam game.

The game was made in GameMaker and is slightly inspired by Wario Land for the Virtual Boy and Celeste. The main mechanic, the depth jump which allows players to switch layers, was interesting to implement. The illusion of moving between two planes, the foreground and background, was achieved by shrinking the players sprite size and switch which objects the player can interact with. I might make the main character into a character mod for Rivals of Aether.

My first game jam and my third finished game. I think the results are not bad. I didn't think I'd manage to do it so fast. Thanks, everyone in this community for the opportunity to have so much fun!

It was interesting to work on a project using a different environment. For sprites, I used Procreate 5 and AirDropped it right into Unity, which is super helpful. Small edits and tweaks, simple new sprites, etc. were ready in seconds.

The hardest part was understanding the scope. I think that the initial plan was perfect. Almost all of the features that are in the game were planned at the start. But estimating how long each element will take and how much time left overall is painful. The time management and planning is massive for this kind of rushes. But I think now I feel more confident about that.

To create sounds, I used only my voice, bass, and rhythm guitars. Post-processed everything in Adobe Audition (7-day trial version) to make it sound like underwater.

I really wanted to make music but didn't have time for this delighter. If you'd like to play my game, I recommend listening to some chill hop on the background.

Now it's time to sleep and play some of your games tomorrow. I wish everyone luck!

Congratulations everyone for joining the jam :)

Submissions are still open for unranked submissions: while those won't be officially ranked, they can expect as many people to play & comment on them. So, if you haven't finished your game in time, it's not too late to complete something! Game submissions will completely close Monday at 10pm UTC.

We will post more details about the voting phase tomorrow evening, but you can already go play & review games right now!

I always, always forget about submission hour! But I still made it.

Really proud of my first pico game and it was great working with something pixel & tile based again. Will definitely repeat.

Hope everyone was able to finish their projects or learn enough to compensate for a half project. Happy post-jam!

I had a lot of fun creating this. My highlight has to be the recording of whale sounds. If they didn't before, my neighbours now think I am totally nuts.
I do wish I had more time (as usual) and would have refined the gameplay mechanics. I had a ton of ideas to add but I would also have liked to refine the way whale-steering works. Whale, it is what it is.
If you like, take a look at

Whale Whale Whale