Alakajam! is soon reaching a pretty round number, will that mean anything special? Nothing particular is announced yet, but it surely is a chance to look back at the three year long history of our small but peaceful community.

See you on the 18-20 September 2020 week-end for that milestone event!

The game jam multiverse is collapsing! In June, Alakajam! and ScoreSpace will join forces to offer you a special event.

For 72 hours, from Friday to Monday, all entrants are invited to make a game. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. On top of that, in a unique twist to game jams, ScoreSpace brings in the idea of making streamers compete on your jam games.

Overview

Detailed schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
June 5, 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	Submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other ideas. Submissions will be eliminated as the week progresses, until only the best remain…
June 12, 7pm UTC	Theme shortlist	The best 10 themes are revealed. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
June 19, 6pm UTC	Countdown stream	An official stream by @DanaePlays is held on Twitch to launch the event!
June 19, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
June 22, 7pm UTC	End of jam	The game development competition ends here, exactly 72 hours after the start time. Submissions will remain open for an additional hour after the deadline. An alternate unranked jam will be held simultaneously for those who want to join and exchange feedback, but not compete.
June 27, 7pm UTC	Jam results	After five days during which all entrants play, rate and comment on other peoples games… The results are released and the 3 awards will be given! "Developer's Solo Choice & Developer's Team Choice" (highest Overall rated entries), plus a special "Streamer's Choice" (picked by the event streamers) will be kept for the next phase.
June 28, 7pm UTC	High score results	For 24 hours, the event streamers will compete and livestream while they play the 3 awarded games. Their goal will be to climb the leaderboard and hopefully win the competition. During that time, community members can of course play and submit scores too!

Rules

See the full rules for the ScoreSpace x Alakajam event here.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

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

An itch.io event will also be created for those who want to submit their game there. However, the ratings phase will only take place here, so make sure to also submit your game on alakajam.com to be part of the official competition!

You may be wondering why little has been announced since the last AKJ Tournament. Behind the scenes, we are actually preparing the 9th Alakajam! to be a special event, and could not announce too much before it is set in stone.

Things are taking shape, so I can tell that the June event should see Alakajam! team up with another community of gamedev enthusiasts :) The two communities make a nice match, as our respective twists to the game jam formula can blend together nicely and make the whole event bigger and more fun. Expect the detailed schedule of this special jam to be announced in the next few days, when all details are finetuned!

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

Pheeew huge relief for me: after trying a first approach at implementing a minecart system and seeing the physics completely fail, I finally managed to put something together. Now on to actual gameplay…

Here's our elevator pitch!

You're in a cave mining for diamonds, when you suddenly have to escape a rockslide. Your only chance is a nearby coal-powered railcart: use it to escape, managing your fuel by making quick stops to mine for coal… other more valuable rocks.

With the theme now revealed, the 8th Alakajam! has started! Let's make games :)

Submission times

The end of the jam is depending on whether you pick ranked or unranked. You can create your game page at any time during the jam (and update it any time after it's created):

• Ranked: February 23rd 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 48 hours (+1 hour for late entries to create their page).
• Unranked: February 24th 10:00pm UTC, which means you have a bit more than 72 hours

Big thanks to DanaePlays and @Aurel300 for hosting the awesome launch stream! If you missed it, you can still find it on her Twitch channel.

Cool things to do during the jam

• Write a blog post: Share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of food or gifs of cute animals. You can also free to use posts for advertising live jam streams.
• Tweet about #alakajam and follow the alakajam Twitter account
• Initialize your game page early!

Have a nice week-end all of you, and see you on the other side!

This Friday, one hour before the jam launch, DanaePlays and @Aurel300 will host a livestream! Featuring jam host @Thrainsa as a guest, it's the closest thing we have to meeting in the flesh, and also:

• a chance for winning magnets and stickers (???),
• for watching the top 10 themes getting eliminated live,
• …and of course for getting 300% hyped before 48 hours of jamming!

See you on DanaePlay's Twitch channel :)