Maybe the trickiest game of the tournament is Whirling Blades, a mouse-only game where all items are used automatically. It can be difficult to understand exactly how things works in the fast-paced action, yet there is a lot of depth to uncover. Let's figure things out together!

Please share in the comments section any info or correction you have, I'll update this post accordingly.

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Items

Item	Dropped	Triggers	Action
Blueberry	Bushes with visible fruits	When the energy bar is depleted	Refills the energy bar
Apple	Trees with visible fruits	When the health bar goes below a certain level	Refills the health bar
Seeds	Fruitless trees & bushes	When walking on a corrupted tile	Reverts the tile to normal grass
Gel	All enemies	When item count reaches a certain value	Upgrades the weapon - First upgrade = 60 gel - Second upgrade = 150 gel - Third upgrade???

Enemies

Enemy	Properties
White insect	Simply runs towards you. May randomly transform into Double spike creatures. If you're cornered, they can deal massive damage due to no attack cooldown.
Double spike	Does not move. Fires artillery strikes that corrupt tiles.
White mask	Moves slowly, shooting purple boomerangs at you.

Tips

• Corrupted tiles: They slow you down, and destroy any living plant on them. Corruption spreads with time to neighbor tiles. In the early game, you can delay the spread of corruption a bit by restoring grass as soon as you can with your seeds. More generally, clear the spike enemies early to prevent them from firing their corrupting attacks.
• Dashing: Useful not only for escaping monsters but also as an attack. Actually seems more powerful than the basic attack.
• Item gathering: It doesn't seem like plants or fruits grow/spread, so gather everything you find as fast as possible.
• Saving blueberries: Technically your energy bar resplenishes automatically, so if you're careful with your clicking, you can save blueberries for later… But to be honest the blueberries rarely empty, so click away!!!

There's no way I'll be able to win this one.

They're all from genres I tend to be bad at aside from MAD SEED and Whirling Blades (mine). It doesn't help that I'm also on a really tight schedule for the Super Potato Bruh development. Looks like @voxel will get an easy first place. :P

The 5th Kajam is over, the long awaited results are in, and sadly I must graciously accept the honour of last place. It may not be your first impression to think of it as an honour, but just as every cloud has a silver lining even last place is itself a prize dependant on how you look at it.
By coming in last I therefore made the most mistakes, and by making the most mistakes I then have the most to learn and gain from taking part in this Kajam. I'm going to attempt to reflect on my own submission and work out what I could have done better. If you have any further constructive feedback I'd love to hear it.

I would like to quickly take this opportunity to thank every single person who played, rated and provided feedback on Street Bots. I appreciate every one of you.

Issue 1 - Inspiration: I chose to make a retro game inspired by Pokémon, a high standard to set the bar by. I did so because I love Pokémon and I've never made an adventure rpg so I wanted to challenge myself. An important step I missed was to look at what gave Pokémon its spark, why people loved the games and what drew them in. I think a big part of Pokémon is the depth of the world; the spreading map that you gradually explore, the chance to encounter new creatues in each place, growing your team and forming an attachment to them over time as they help you overcome various challenges. I dont think a lot of these features translate well to a smaller, shorter game which is of course what I would be making when taking part in a timed event (and starting 3 weeks late!).

Issue 2 - Flare (or lack thereof): Not being an artist this is probably something I am often guilty of. A game doesnt have to be flashy to be good but the lifeless, unanimated battles of Street Bots certainly didnt add to the immersion. The battles lacked both SFX and animation and I think this detracted from the "fall in love factor" which can draw people into games. Another example would be the player movement. I struggled at first to get the movement to feel how I wanted and decided to opt for the "good enough" approach and move on. This was a mistake because movement was such a huge part of the game. The first thing you do is move, the majority of time playing the game is probably spent moving around. I tested the game many many times and got used to the clunky movement, however to someone just downloading and trying the game the awkwardness would detract heavily from the rest of the experience.

Issue 3 - Scope: The game was just too much for me to handle in only just over a week. Add in that I got suddenly sick and didn't do any dev for 2 or 3 days and there's just not enough time. If I'd had the time I would've added a lot more to some of the existing mechanics; multiple bot battles using teams, some sort of effectiveness system in battles,  a mechanic similar to wild Pokémon for training your bots and full keyboard controls! No more cheap UI and mouse elements. Some of these features could've added more variety and life to the game. In it's current state it feels linear and stale.

Despite the bad things I've said about it I'm very proud of Street Bots. I love the game and learned a lot from creating it.
If you've actually read this entire post then thank you for reading my internal monologue brain dump. I hope you too can learn something from it.
Another huge thanks to everyone who played Street Bots, everyone who took part in Kajam 5 and the fantastic organisers of Alakajam. I look forward to the next one!

Wildfire is a game that you probably didn't play for the 5th Kajam, mainly because I completely failed to get it done in time.

The main reason for that was that I was busy working on a killer feature that I wanted to have available before people played (and forgot about) the game.

The new feature I've added to the game is the ability to create levels. This is pretty cool (IMHO) because it's adding "cloud saves" to a PICO-8 game. The way it's done is by exploiting the GPIO flags that were added to PICO-8 presumably to be able to control simple lights on your Raspberry Pi or similar. Since the data needed to store a level is pretty light, I save it in these GPIO controls, which can then be read by the HTML5 app serving the PICO-8 cart. The data is then stored on my own server via a REST interface.

This means that any level you create is available to play for all players via the "challenges" list! I can't wait to see what kind of crazy challenges will appear!

Have a play here: Wildfire

The 5th Kajam took place during the month of August, seing 9 entries submitted around the "Retro" theme. If you want to join the next one, know that it will take place in November, and will be hosted by regular member @DaFluffyPotato!

But what is a Kajam?

Kajams are relaxed competitions taking place over a full month, in which we make a video game focusing on a specific aspect of game making. The rules are pretty open, and don't require you to work throughout the month - even a tiny game made in an evening, or an improvement of an existing game of yours can fit! Kajams are perfect to learn, experiment and improve your gamedev skills. Detailed rules here.

The topic of the next Kajam will be chosen by its host and announced upon the start of the event. Follow us on Twitter or Reddit to stay updated!

EDIT: The Kajam is cancelled - what about we host something different this time? To be announced shortly!

The jam is over

You all did an awesome job! Thanks to all the great devs who took part in this jam, by creating a 'retro' game during August 2018 and especially by playing and rating other games. Telling the creators of a game what you feel, like (and perhaps dislike) on a game is super valuable and will create a huge amount of motivation! We are especially happy that we have a new submission highscore for a Kajam.

Of course we have some shiny medals to show! The games were rated on a single 'retro' score. While createing a game on its own is an awesome achievement and everyone can be super proud of the games, some were worth mentioning far beyond the other games. So without further adue:

Here are the results

Long live the jam

Of course we all get a sort of past-jam-blues after such an awesome event. But fear not! We have some awesome events prepared for you:

2nd Alakajam Tournament September 8 - 23 2018

During the tournamet you can compete in games created for the 3rd Alakajam or the 5th Kajam via our highscore system, either for the fastest speedrun or the highest score.

4th Alakajam October 12 - 14 2018

The next regular Alakajam will take place in October 12-14. This is a big, weekend-long event for you to take part in!

6th Kajam November 2018

The next month-long event will be run in November by @DaFluffyPotato . If you enjoyed doing this Kajam, save the date and clear your calendar as it will be equally awesome!

Here it is, at last: the 2nd AKJ Tournament!

"Hey, why the late starting date?"

We decided to delay slightly, to allow thorough voting on the 5th Kajam (theme: "Retro"). You can view the results here. Congratulations to the winners, and to everybody who participated!

So, what's this tournament all about?

Between the 9th and 23rd of September 2018 we'll be playing and competing at six games submitted to previous competitions. You can see the rules here.

Enough! What are the games already?!

Game	Author(s)	Genre	Jam	Notes
Hunk Hustler	sebastianscaini, Josh_Schwarm, Wulusi, carsonmackie	Beat-em-up	3rd Alakajam!
MAD SEED	voxel	First Person Shooter	3rd Alakajam!
Pandemia	benjamin	Puzzle	3rd Alakajam!	Play vs 1 AI
Philosopher's Strike	Wan, Thrainsa	Space Shooter	1st Alakajam!
Thyl's Tale	Laguna, KaramBharj, Thunraz, xXBloodyOrange	Action RPG	5th Kajam
Whirling Blades	DaFluffyPotato	Isometric Combat	3rd Alakajam!

Congratulations to everyone!

During the month of August you managed to create a game! But we have another reason to celebrate: This is the Kajam with the most entries! Keep up the spirit and spread the word!

Voting

During the next week (from 3. September to 9. September) you will have the chance to play and rate all the awesome games, which have been created for this Kajam. There is only one voting category, called "retro". And of course you can give comment on everybody's game and give them a lot of valuable feedback!

"Help, I am late!"

Don't worry! Submissions will stay open until the end of the jam (until Sunday, 9. September). However, it is recommended to submit as soon as possible. This will give other jammers time to give feedback and also give you the time to comment and rate the other entries.

HEEEEEEEEY!

Now that's how you start a blog! :D

…

Okay, but for real now:

I have never posted or even thought about posting anything like a blog before. I started learning how to program games when I was younger, but only about a month ago did I decide that I reeaaaally wanted to do it. But since I had little experience, I decided to pick up an engine, learn what I could, and then start making games!

I found Alakajam off a random page on my twitter @SnowFoxGames. I'd been given advice to join game jams, but I'm not comfortable going to any in person, especially if it meant working with…gulp…other human beings! (Dun dun dun!!!!)

I'm hoping to improve my skills as a developer as well as gain the confidence to finally poke my head out of my safety shell :)

I am certainly not ready for the weekend only challenge. For goodness sakes, it takes a month for me to be able to get anything done around here!

When the next Kajam starts, I will definitely see to it that I enter.

Look out world! This Fox has teeth and is ready to bite!(Or something)

My plans for August were to make a game for Ludum Dare 42 that could also fit this month's Kajam. When the LD came up with the theme "Running out of space", I quickly got the idea of a terminal game where the goal was to free space. I also felt slightly lazy at that time, and not too excited by the idea of writing a fake file system with commands for it, for some reason. When @Aurel300 offered me to join his LD entry as a composer, I was quite quick to accept, and immediately trashed my game idea x)

Fast forward to this morning - after a few days, the scrapped idea had time to grow on me a bit, and I felt I could still explore it for the Kajam. Making working terminal commands was more fun and less work than I expected! After 2 or 3 hours I could eventually add the game contents, and take some time to polish various corner cases (I was sure some players would try obscure things to see what they would do, so I didn't want to disappoint :P)

The end result took about 4 hours to make, it is short but hopefully fun. Let me know what you think!