With the jam underway for 7 days now, it would be a good time to start sharing your ideas. You can create an entry earlier and update it later once you've made more progress.

What I want to make myself is a blues improvisation simulator. Jamming blues music is one of the staples of playing music together with fellow musicians. Because of its standard format and scale, anyone who knows these things even a little can jump in and join the fun that is improvising music together with other people.

Sadly most non-musicians never get to experience this, so I thought I'd try to find a way to simulate it somewhat. It's not going to be a game per se, but more an online toy / educational experience sort of thing. The idea is that I'll provide a virtual piano you can play with the keyboard of your computer. The twist is that you can only play notes that are in a blues pentatonic scale, which means that basically all notes will sound alright. To have something to play along with, I'll record a bunch of backing tracks on guitar which will provide a standard 12-bar blues framework. This way you can jam out on the virtual piano along with my guitar playing, so we're effectively jamming together :)

So yeah, that's what I'll be making. Show me what you've got in mind!

Welcome to the 8th Kajam! It's all about:

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Music is a big part of most games, but often it's only a thing that plays in the background. Although important to set the mood and communicate what's going on, for this kajam I'd like to put music more in the spotlight.

It would be great to see some creations in which music is the central subject. It can be anything as long it has some link to music, such as:

• A rhythm game!
• A dancing game!
• Maybe the protagonist is a musician!
• Or a composer!
• Or a sound engineer!

It doesn't even have to be a game in the traditional sense. Toys, experiences & experiments are very much encouraged. Anything goes, as long as it's all about the 🎵MUSIC 🎵

How does this work?

This Kajam follows the normal Kajam rules, which can be found here: https://alakajam.com/article/kajam-rules

The event starts 1 January and runs for the whole month. You're encouraged to submit your entry by Friday 24 January, so there will be a full week at the end of January for rating submissions. The event will end on Friday 31 January.

This is a relaxed game jam, so anything goes really. Just try to come up with a cool concept and use the time to make the best of it.

I don't have anything to make music with!

Luckily there are more tools than ever to help you make music / sounds nowadays. And a lot of them are even free! Back in 2017 I hosted a miniLD for which we compiled a whole lot of them. I've copied that list here, so you can try these suggestions to see if something clicks with you.

• BeepBox: http://www.beepbox.co/
• Bosca Ceoil: https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/bosca-ceoil
• Bfxr: https://donkeyspaceman.itch.io/bfxr
• Drumbot: http://www.drumbot.com/
• Sonant Live: http://sonantlive.bitsnbites.eu/
• Audiotool: https://www.audiotool.com/app
• LMMS: https://lmms.io/
• Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• Ardour: http://ardour.org/
• DarkWave Studio: http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/darkwave-studio/
• orDrumbox: http://www.ordrumbox.com/
• Temper: http://www.angryredplanet.com/temper/
• Mixxx: http://www.mixxx.org/
• Hydrogen: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/
• Rosegarden: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
• Qtractor: https://qtractor.sourceforge.io/
• MusE: http://muse-sequencer.org/
• Open ModPlug: https://openmpt.org/
• MilkyTracker: http://milkytracker.org/
• SunVox: http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/
• FamiTracker: http://www.famitracker.com/
• MadTracker: http://www.madtracker.org/
• Many more trackers: https://woolyss.com/tracking-trackers.php
• And even more trackers: https://woolyss.com/chipmusic-chiptrackers.php
• pxtone: http://www.cavestory.org/pixels-works/pxtone-collage.php
• blipseq: https://drive.google.com/
• FL Studio: https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/
• BeepComp: http://hiromorozumi.com/beepcomp/

If you have a suggestion of your own, please let me know in the comments and I'll make sure it gets added :)

That's all for now. Have fun & good luck!

The 8th Kajam will start with the new year and will focus on Music!

It will be hosted by game developer and musician @Tijn (Twitter). His experience in music includes contributing songs (as Nerk) to the soundtrack of PC game My Summer Car, composing the occasional chiptune with the Adlib tracker and having a weird passion for exotic VST plugins.

Stay tuned for more details :)

The next edition of the Alakajam! event will start on February 21th.

As always, the event is about making a game, from nothing, in a weekend. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. If you opt-in to the competition, you will be ranked against every other contestant! If you prefer a more relaxed setting, the unranked jam will still give you an opportunity to get plays and comments.

 

Schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
February 7, 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
February 14, 7pm UTC	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
February 21, 6pm UTC	Countdown stream	An official stream is held on Twitch bu @DanaePlays, @Aurel300 and guest @Thrainsa to launch the event!
February 21, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
February 23, 7pm UTC	End of ranked jam	The main competition ends here, exactly 48 hours after the start time. Submissions will remain open for an additional hour after the deadline.
February 24,10pm UTC	End of unranked jam	If you want to go for a relaxed weekend - or need more time - you can create a game in the 72 hours of the unranked jam.
March 8, 7pm UTC	Results	After two weeks during which all entrants are invited to play, rate and comment on other peoples games… The results are released and the winners crowned!

Rules

There are three divisions:

- Solo, in which you make a whole game alone in 48 hours
- Team, in which any number of persons can gather to make a game in 48 hours
- Unranked, a more open division which grants about 72 hours to finish the game. Useful for those not interested in the competitive aspect of the event, want to work on an existing project of theirs, or simply did not finish their game in time.

See the full rules for the Alakajam.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

1. Create an account on this website
2. Publish your game before the deadline

A lot of participants also post an "I am in" blog post presenting themselves or their team before the event. Describe what tools and frameworks and engines you will use to create your awesome game! Which themes do you like? Let us and the community know!

If you can, feel free to spread the word about the jam - the more we are, the merrier! glhf ;)

Thanks to our six submitters, and thank you to those who played the games and told the developers what you think about their games!

If you missed out, we will have another Feedback Fortnight, usually once a year. Get your game ready so you can submit it and get feedback before you release your game!

Coming up next will be the 8th Kajam! The Kajam is an event which focuses on a single topic. Unlike the Alakajams, the format for the Kajam is more relaxed, and you will have the entire month of January to work on your game. The theme for the 8th Kajam will be music! More information will come soon!

Today is the last day of Feedback Fortnight! It is your last chance to play the games and tell the creators what you think!

I also recommend everyone give the games another spin. Maybe on your second or third play you might find more thoughts you may want to share with the authors.

Don't forget to submit to Feedback Fortnight before the submissions window closes! We will give an extra few days before closing submissions. However, if you submit earlier, this gives your associates more time to give you feedback! Don't be someone who tries to submit in the last few days hoping for lots of feedback!

For those who aren't sure how it works, here is a bit of explanation. Take any game that you (or your team) have made, and submit it. It can be made for a game jam, for a personal project, from anywhere for anywhere, and submit it. We only ask that you don't charge money to play it. During the next two weeks, we play each other's games and give critical feedback on everything and everything we imagine. So, if you submit, be prepared to play other games and give them feedback too.

So what are you waiting for! Find that game you want to have player feedback on! Submit it, and start reviewing the other games!

Feedback Fortnight will be from December 6 to December 31! This is an event where you submit any game, and ask for feedback! If you do so, you should also give feedback to everyone else who submitted! We all need feedback on our games, right? We need to know what people think of our games!

During the weekend of the 6th-7th, submit your game to Alakajam. Then, for the next two weeks, play other games and wrote comments about your experiences, what is or isn't fun, what you think about the details, menus, controls, graphics, sound, and anything and everything else!

Your game need not be made this weekend, or for a game jam, but you can use any game you have made! We only ask that it can be made available to play for free.

The games won't get any rankings or ratings, just feedback. No bragging about being first, but who cares, you will get good commentary!

Congratulations to the authors of finished (and unfinished) Challenge entries! It can take some courage to finally brand your game as commercial and put a price tag on it. We hope this event helped some of you jump this hurdle.

Feedback week

We now have one week reserved to gather some feedback on the submissions. Everyone is invited to comment on:

• The product itself (game quality) ;
• The store presentation / marketing / pricing aspects.

I'll be leaving submissions open during the next week for any late entry.

Challenge winners

Any entry that made money is considered a winner! Let me know when you win to be added to this list. You also earn the right to use this badge anywhere you see fit :)

	Win date	Entry	Author
	Dec. 1st	Random Sports Party	@jcochet @Ilkalys
	Nov. 26th	Dashy no Witch	@voxel

Congratulations to Aurel300, shintaku, and jcochet for their amazing skills at the games that you, the participants of Alakajam, have created!

Go admire the leaderboard here!

If you would like to see your creation being featured in the 6th Alakajam Tournament which will be approximately some time around March 2020, fill out the form here!

Coming soon will be the November Challenge, and then in December we will have Feedback Fortnight! November Challenge is a challenge to yourself to make $1 from your video games. Feedback Fortnight is where you can take a work in progress, submit it, and participants give feedback to all the games submitted.

Thanks to both all the makers of the games and to the players of the games! It takes both to have fun making and playing video games!