Theme Ranking is up for the 8th Alakajam!

You can now choose which are the best themes for you and this 8th Alakajam.
These 10 themes came out from a list of 174 themes so they are surely all good but which one is THE THEME?

To give you motivation and inspiration, try to give us here an elevator pitch of a game having the more themes ;)
I'll start:

You found a Treasure Map that reveals Secrets Loots coming from Among the stars. Theses loots were buried in the Depth of the sea by a powerful Summoner. Your journey starts in a peaceful Harbour but The road will be long and perilous until you can finally Steal the secrets from the summoner. As soon as you leave the harbour the Weather starts to to change and soon the worst storm you've ever seen is upon you…

Greetings from France, where we'll be reforming the team from last jam! Our last time together was when we worked on Arkenstone (pictured on the right), and we're hoping to have a great week-end together again.

The team

• @BalBoom Game design
• @Thrainsa Code
• @Wan Art & audio

This is now the fourth jam for BalBoom, while Thrainsa and I have been guilty of numerous game jams entries on both Alakajam and Ludum Dare.

Our plans

The last jam left us with mixed feelings. On one side it was fun to make a good old "platformer-with-a-twist" for the first time in a while (we used to do those all the time for our first jams in the early 2010s). On the other hand, it proved trickier than expected this time to code the mechanics we had in mind and glue everything together into a finished game. That left little time to polish the look and feel of the game, and literally zero time for audio.

We're still discussing what kind of game we'd like to do, but the main goal is to get the scope as small as possible in terms of code - and assets ideally, to leave plenty of space for polish.

Techs we'll most certainly be using are Unity and the Reason music software, the rest will depend on the game.
Have a nice jam!

Never learn anything from my past mistakes! (I'm not great at this but it's so much fun)
and it's my 7th alakajam but I failed the second If I remember correctly.

unreal or unity (or any other engine that will tempt me until the jam launch date)
blender
aesprite
fruityloop
cesca coil
paint.net

Everything will probably depend on my mental health. As always I will love going through all your submissions and see all of your beautiful beautiful projects full of nice things and creativity.

Thundercats out!

EDIT: Event launch has been postponed by a week, sorry for the delay!

In March will be held the 6rd AKJ Tournament, where the community is invited once again to play & compete on existing jam games!

If you want to submit your own game to the event, follow this link :)

This will be my 8th Alakajam and my 17th (I think) game jam. Unlike my last two entries, I plan on putting all my effort in again. Historically, my "low effort" entries have done really well, but I think it was mostly a result of the type of design choices I made to fit those constraints. I'll be pulling another Lollipop Ninja / Whirling Blades / Spellcaster's Forest type of entry where I put in every bit of time I've got while likely losing sleep in the process.

Here's my last entry (which was made in 7 hours):

What I'm using:

• Python 3
• Pygame 2
• Aseprite / MS Paint for artwork (yes, I finally got Aseprite)
• LMMS for music
• SFXR / BFXR / Foley for SFX (idk yet)
• My own pixel art fonts (Released in the Public Domain)

I've done a ton of game jams now, so I decided to make a graph with all my Ludum Dare and Alakajam results. (Alakajam scores were halved to adapt the the LD's scale)

In the graph it definitely looks like I've plateaued in recent events, but all of my recent entries have been rather time restricted aside from my AKJ5 entry which had some serious design flaws. I hit an 8.0 (or 4.0 when scaled) overall for my last entry and I'm really hoping I can beat that. Every 0.1 you go past 4.0 gets exponentially harder though. 4.0 seems to be a pretty tough barrier to pass because of the way people rate things.

Good luck everyone!

Theme submission is up for the 8th Alakajam!

Whether you're one of those people that submit floating islands on every jam on the planet, or you're a Voxel follower and really want to have GIANT ROBOTS win for the first time in history, get in there and submit some themes!

Be original! favor themes that:
- Refer to gameplay and mood instead of literal theme and elements
- Are abstract or can be interpreted in many ways
- Don't constrain the games too much into a specific game genre

But hey, I'm not the police, do whatever you want :)
Have fun!
Raindrinker

Now that the music jam is officially over, I'd like to thank everyone who participated. Thanks!

If you want to check out the entries, they can be found here: https://alakajam.com/music-kajam/games

We got 4 entries in total and I think each of them are great. Everyone should feel proud of what they've accomplished! I know I do :)

Until the next time!

I managed to release Minimum Damage today, and only a couple of days late! I'm actually really happy with the end result: pretty much everything is amateurish, crass and probably broken, but unlike my other games it looks intentional.

This is the first time I've created music for a jam game, but it's been a hugely positive experience. In particular I found it a real relief to work on the music, and get away from the screen (or at least, the IDE) for a while. I've found - like with graphics - that having some concrete assets, no matter how tacky, in place really motivates me in the soul-crushing twilight that is the end stage of game jams. It also took the game in more imaginative directions than I think it could have gone otherwise.

In addition to the music, I'm quite happy with the original idea. For one thing the graphics were simple enough that I could implement them very quickly, allowing time to think about more important things. The execution is imperfect, but maybe I can work that out at a later stage.

So thanks, @Tijn, for hosting this jam! I certainly learned something.

I may come to regret this, but I had an idea to create a sheet music bullet hell game. After an hour or so of hacking I got this far.

Most of the basics are there; it just needs some simple collision code and then I can get started on the squishy bits.

P.s. Yes I'm aware that isn't a minim >__<

My original plan was to add music to a past jam game, but I have this little idea for a platformer that feels easy enough to explore. It will be pretty straightforward mechanics-wise, possibly quite hard, and as the gif suggests it will be synchronized to the music.

Good news is it took under two hours to get the basics in place with Unity. It's surprising that not many games I've seen explore that kind of stuff… The closest that comes to mind is the "140" indie game, otherwise I haven't seen it in jams that much.

The gif is only an early test so possibly not representative. I'm not 100% sure where this will end, but I have in mind some danceclub-like atmosphere with a heavy electro track on top, and difficult platforming where you find gaps between constantly moving shapes to try and stay alive. Let's see what I can get!