Being away from home this week I'm aiming for something small, so here's a couple rough game ideas I had to put aside, feel free to find inspiration in them:

Graygreen City (Strategy/Puzzle)

The player has to transform a polluted city into a greener one. The view is top-down, tile-based. The gameplay consists in spending slowly refilling money by replacing tiles from certain types into other types, the goal being to reinvent the way cities are organized in order to pollute less.

• Tile types: Road, Housing, Pavement, Offices, Shops, Parks.
• Variables:
  • Pollution (increases with cars on roads, parks reduce it, you win if you get to zero)
  • Productivity (increases with the time people spend at work, the higher the more money you get)
  • Anger (increases when people take longer to reach work/market, lowers with time, you get fired/lose if maxed out)
• Units:
  • Car (moves fast on roads, cannot go to a tile occupied by another car)
  • Pedestrian (moves slowly on the pavement, can overlap other pedestrians)
• Citizen AI: 1 housing tile = 1 citizen, attached to a random Office on the map (rerolled if deleted), and the nearest market to its home. Each citizen loops between "Home until 6am > Work until 12am > Home until 6pm > Shop until 12pm". Can either move as a car or a pedestrian, but will always use the car if it is faster than walking.

Comments : It might take a while to get right in terms of balancing. The AI should be fun to code but a bit long to complete. And yes, you can probably win by replacing everything with parks, maybe the city population at victory time is your final score?

The Path to Laughing with Salad (Walking sim or Text game)

This could work either as a walking simulator (made with RPG Maker for instance), or simply a simple interactive story. Something visual like a top down RPG view with some interactions would probably work best though.

The player goes through a typical day. The first day plays itself without any choices, the protagonist having certain habits. A certain event makes them suddenly willing to change their routine for the better good. Throughout the next day and onwards the player is faced with multiple difficult choices. What's better for the environment might have a negative impact in the short term (especially in terms of comfort), but turn out helpful in the long run:

• Going to work by car or bike: If you pick the bike, at first you arrive late and sweaty. You fix the first problem by setting the alarm clock earlier the next day, and the sweatiness by preparing a change of clothes. After a few days like this you get fit and don't even sweat anymore.
• Buying transformed or fresh foods: The food you cook yourself is terrible at first, but you get better (reading recipes in the evening can help). You also have to choose the quantities you buy, and will most probably fail with rotten leftovers or not enough food at first.
• Bring homemade food to work: Linked to the previous item. If you don't bring food, you'll have to choose between an expensive place or one whose packaging lead to a lot of waste.
• Turn the heat up at home or not: If you keep the heat low, you get annoyed by the cold but eventually get into the habit of wearing warmer clothes at home.

Various possible endings to that once the player has reached a green enough lifestyle. Maybe something to hint at an apparent uselessness of all the effort when there are industries nearby blasting waste at a different scale…

I tried to convince friends to participate with me, but it didn't work. So I'm going it alone. :)

This is also my first Alakajam!

I have some vague ideas about making a strategy game, but not sure about the mechanics yet. I'll use:

• Browser/JavaScript/WebGL
• Three.js WebGL library
• a text editor ;)
• Logic Pro for music (hopefully I wont run out of time for that)
• Audacity for audio editing
• Gimp for bitmap editing

Really looking forward to this one! :)

I am new to game jam so, I really to participate to this.

The theme is really meaningful and I want to try to do something about it. Mainly a designer, but in a week it could seem to be something at the end.

Another boring "I'm in" post, yey!

About a month ago, I published a game titled "wither", and it was one of my best games, and it was really hard, and it used 1 color.

For this jam, I'll do something similar to some of my previous games: multiple jams at once. My record is 8.

I decided to make an apocalyptic aftermath to "wither", where you wake up in a burning, rotting world.

PS. I'm so used to writing stuff like "sprite_width" that I first wrote "width" instead of "wither". LMAO.

I'm in for this jam! Using Godot again, Photoshop for art, PxTone for music, and probably bfxr for sound.

I also want to do a daily blog post that covers everything I'm working on and my process, to participate in the community here more and add some content to the front page, so this is my first one of those. Here's some music that should get everyone in the mood for a climate change jam, and hopefully get everyone to read this whole post…

I haven't had the best luck with longer jams, mostly because it feels like so much extra time that I don't scope properly, so this time around I'm going to change up my standard practice. I've planned out my tasks for every day of the jam in advance, and I'm scoping for 4-5 days instead of the full seven. This should give me time to fix bugs, polish, and get those sound effects and music tracks done for once. Here's my starting plan in case anyone else is interested:

1. core gameplay design and code, balancing growth powers and fruit times
2. art (sally, g-mo, vine leaf, veggies, building bg, water, menu, cards, portraits)
3. animations (vine growth, fruits, water FBF, mouths) and screen transitions
4. code polish and transitions, tutorial, save and load highscores
5. code extra
6. music and sfx
7. art and anim extra (sally gardening/win/loss anims? shaded art pass?)
8. project extra (remove 3d lighting profile from export, record final gifs, etc)

The design I want to do is inspired by Pieces of Cake and Starseed Pilgrim, it'll be turn based and use randomized edge connectivity but other than that I'll be designing as I go. Basically, hand of cards, they have different growth behaviors, and possibly can only attach to the level on the randomized sides that have arrows. Good harvests add cards to your deck, so there's an element of endless play, but I might have an ending as well for highscore purposes. P1 Select had a cool score averaging mechanic that works better with a finite game experience, if you haven't played that (free!) game yet you are really missing out.

One of the big things I also want to try out in this jam is the 2D animation system in Godot, particularly with Polygon2D rigs and Skeletons. Maybe even mess around with dynamic polygonal water effects… The plan is to basically get the gameplay done first, and then try these systems as early as possible, to make sure they are useable in gamejam time constraints. If I'm struggling by the end of day 3, I have the time to revert to other animation styles, and a full "extra" day reserved for it.

And speaking of the extra days, they're basically my time cutoffs for different aspects of the jam. Code must be done by day 5, art should be done by day 3 but can be polished up to day 7. The art extra day would be a paintover of existing assets only, so I just have to reimport everything and it will work in-game without changes. If things are going particularly well, though, I might add more content for the transition scenes and actions, since everything else will be done by that point.

Day eight is only for things that are non-essential, and will be bumped up if I'm working much faster than expected. Since I plan to blog post every day, I'll have WIPs I can use for project pages, and everything else would just improve the size and speed of the export. Nice to have, but not required.

Okay, day 0 tasks are basically to set up an empty project, grocery shop, do laundry, etc. I'm starting my jam tomorrow when I wake up, so the day 1 post will be later that day, when I have some work to show. Good luck everyone! And if anyone else wants to do daily blog posts with me, I'll be happy to read how other people do their jams.

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There aren’t many “serious” game jams out there, which is understandable. Probably because it’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t scream FUN. It might require a bit more thinking. You can't just make a Snake clone and be done with it.

So yeah - let’s have one next month!

About what? About one of the greatest problems of our generation of course! Our planet’s climate is changing, and it’s not for the better. In fact, if we don’t do something about it right now, Earth will be in large parts uninhabitable for humans. Not in the far-away future, but in our lifetime. (And yes, it is our fault.)

What can I do?

While 'game developer' isn't a very useful profession for the (post) apocalypse, maybe it still can be useful for spreading awareness before all this!

Want to be an activist? Try to make a game about fun activities like plogging! How about a fishing game in a pond full of trash? And how will gardening look like in 2050? Maybe you’re more of the scientist type - make little simulations! How will the rising water levels affect your life, our lives? Is there a slim chance we get saved? Or maybe you want you want to debate? Try your luck with climate deniers. Lost all hope? Why not make something apocalyptic which depicts the grim future you envision!

In any case, try to make something with an impact - which means it doesn't even have to be a game. Take the climate protest to the internet by creating something everyone can experience - take part in the Climate Change Jam! It will be a week-long event, commencing from August 10th to 18th (choose your own start time)!

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Twitter-Hashtags: #alakajam and #AlakaCCJ

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Oh, and this jam is open for everyone, not just the youth.

The tournament is on, people! Let's get moving!

We've released half of the games so far. So focus on these for now, and we'll release the other ones soon!

So what are you waiting for? Get playing!

Time to warm up those digits for some button mashing, people, because there's a tournament coming up soon!

How it works

For two weeks, from 12th-27th July 2019, everyone is invited to play and post high scores on a selection of games which have been submitted to the site. 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! :)

We need your games!

You might be wondering, which games? Well, good question! If you've submitted a game on alakajam.com which has high scores and might be suitable, let us know—simply fill out this form. Before the tournament begins a small number of games will be picked. The more accessible the better (so cross-platform and web games are preferred), and we try to have a nice blend of genres. Remember, this is a great opportunity to have your games played!

It's official: the results for the 6th 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, we've got a short survey you should definitely check out.

Upcoming events

The next Alakajam! will take place on the 20-22 September 2019 week-end, book the date! Since September is in a long time, we have a couple events in store before then:

• On July 12nd, we'll start the 4rd AKJ Tournament, where the community is invited like last time to play & compete on jam games! If you want to submit your own game to the event, follow this link.

• The whole month of August will be dedicated to a new Kajam. Its host will choose a topic that we'll be invited to study and make a game around!

Have a nice summer everyone, we hope to see you in the upcoming events!

We made a 2 player game this time, so grab a friend and shoot and parry each other for a while. It gets addicting I promise.

We need a couple more votes to get to 10!
You can check it out here: https://alakajam.com/6th-alakajam/732/yamabushi/