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 :)

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!

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 :)