I'm a bit disappointed with the results for Whirling Blades, but I guess that's what I get for doing something I'm not good at (isometric). xD

The goal was to make a well rounded game while also stepping out of my comfort zone, which I did. I've never done anything isometric before and knew almost nothing about it when I started. I didn't look up anything and did everything by just figuring it out. It was a great learning experience.

The good:

• The game was completely different from my other games, which was probably nice for anyone that has played most of my games.
• The mechanics turned out great. They were simple since you only used the mouse, but also still fun.
• The character designs turned out good aside from the big tanky one, which I didn't draw by hand before I started.
• The visual effects were nice in my opinion. (the eruptions and the slashing)

Here's the single paper I used for the idea beforehand. I'm definitely not an artist outside of pixel art.

The bad:

• The artwork didn't turn out as good as I had hoped. The rating really shows it when compared to Lollipop Ninja. Part of the issue was that I wasn't used to working from an isometric perspective, but I believe the main issue was the dark outline. I've had a few people outside of the AKJ complain about that specifically. The outlines also reduced the space I had to work in, which also reduced my ability to add detail. The over abundance of green in the play area was also a common complaint.
• There were a few minor design issues, such as the difficulty scaling and the fact that you can get stuck in a corner next to the "stompers" which causes tons of damage.

The ugly:

• I assumed that adding depth in the form of items and unique traits for each enemy that took some thinking to figure out were a good thing since it was "optional" depth, but this ended up making people not like the game. Humans tend to not like the unknown, so the items that were automatically used and the overly varied enemy traits probably made the game worse for most people.
• The game at its core was just a game where you kill things in an expanding area. IMHO, it seemed like the isometric elements and everything else were just tacked on to a very generic concept. Nobody really complained about it, but I prefer for the core of my games to be more innovative than that. In Lollipop Ninja, the core idea was that you jump around and use terrain as a shield from "enemies", which is presented in a humorous fashion. I think I did a good job with Precious Cargo, which was one of my older LD games. The core idea was that you were on a moving platform around other moving platforms with enemies knocking you around while you needed to go onto the enemies' platforms to keep yours in the air. It sounds complex, but in a game it actually works really well. I think if I remade this core concept now, it would be a pretty good game.
• I didn't have time to add fullscreen, so accidentally clicking out of the window became a rather annoying problem for almost anyone playing. Although it seems like a lot of people missed the note that F11 could be used to make the window larger.

The big mistake that resulted in a lot of these issues was that I was somewhat blinded be the desire to make a fast-paced isometric fighting game. I had some cool ideas in my head, but forgot to think about potential issues in design before getting to work. Normally I spend 60-90 minutes on the game's concept, wheras for this one, I only spent about 10. Next game jam I'll try to dedicate more time to design (>= 3 hours) and less to content since it seems to be the major issue with a lot of my games. I wasted so much time on Lollipop Ninja making levels nobody would play and I wasted a lot of time making items and enemy traits that people would just find a nuisance when making Whirling Blades. On The Crushed Sky (one of my LD games), I also spent way too much time making levels that nobody would play. I even made a boss battle with its own set of tiles that almost nobody ever played.

The boss fight from The Crushed Sky:

I'm slowly figuring out game design and hopefully I'll make something great when I enter the next Ludum Dare!

EDIT: I also need to stop going so low-rez with my artwork. >.>

Congratulations one last time to everyone who entered the 3rd Alakajam! You can discover the best rated games of the jam here:

Solo winners | Team winners

High fives to everyone who took part in this fun event, whether by submitting games, joining the theme submissions, rating games and most of all giving valuable feedback to others :)

We hope you enjoyed the jam!

Next Events

4th Alakajam: 12-14 October 2018

5th Kajam: August 1st to August 30th hosted by @Laguna (What is a Kajam?)

Behind the Scenes

Thanks to all the people who made this event possible:

• @wan and @toasty for helping me run the event and the Twitter account
• @aurel and @danaeplays for the wonderful launch stream
• All 10 contributors to the website source code (proudly made in NodeJS!)
• All the streamers, youtubers and speedrunners who covered the event :)
• And of course, all of you in the community - without you there is no jam!

We hope to see you back for more jamming on future events!

It's your last chance to rate Hunk Hustler! If you haven't already, we'd really appreciate your ratings!

Woop woop, I'm doing one of these too.
You can play it at https://alakajam.com/3rd-alakajam/308/infinite-potential/
(Post-mortem also on https://iris-xiii.tumblr.com/post/175512643353/infinite-potential-post-mortem)

Apparently there's a few mac bugs regarding fullscreen. I'm going to be ignoring them from the time being, since I can't test on mac (oops) and that looks hard to fix. Nothing game breaking, thankfully.

Being made during 48 hours, and not being used to such a short time limit myself, it's obviously nothing to drop your jaw at. Still, I think it manages to be fun sometimes, or at least it's definitely fun for a while for some people, which is great enough to me for the time being. Now, time to delve into its issues!

• First off, spawning. I don't think only allowing powerups or enemies to spawn when they're off screen was a great idea. While it punishes staying in the same area for too long, it punishes with boredom, which isn't exactly good. Also, while having powerups spawn only when you can't seem them worked out alright on my computer, it gets rather messy with different screen and window sizes. If your screen is just large enough, nothing will spawn, ever. The spawning system was a bit rushed over, but I failed to consider these issues and I will have to be more careful next time I add anything which depends on the size of the window you're playing on.

• Weapon balance issues: There's a few, even though it used to be even worse. The sword (2nd wepaon) is widely regarded as useless and too risky to use, and many agree that it needs a longer range or something among these lines. Although its hitbox was increased to be twice as large during development, it was clearly not enough, and dealing only twice as much damage as a fireball does, it's usually not worth the risk. Regarding the fireballs and bombs, I think they're fairly good myself. Some people have complained about the bombs being on a way too large cooldown, and taking too long to go off, but considering they do way more damage than anything else in the game (Unless you've managed to gather a serious amount of powerups) I think it's pretty balanced. Even if it takes 4 bombs to get rid of some creatures, you can usually outrun them by getting one or two powerups: So they're not as dangerous as they might seem, they're just a bag of extra points, or a punishment if you happen not to be careful enough.

• Controls: I think I've done way better in this game than in the past, and so far only one person has complained about them. While you can stick to ceilings during a jump and that shouldn't happen, it's the only thing that doesn't feel quite right (to me). Could definitely be improved on, but they're reliable and good enough.

• AI: I've gotten all kinds of feedback on this one. It's a hacked together mess, and fairly dumb, I acknowledge it. However given how basic it is, it doesn't work too bad. While the completely random jump allows enemies to get stuck for longer than they should, it also makes it impossible to predict when they'll decide to jump, leading to some situations in which they'll jump at the same time you do while you try to jump over them, and thus end up smacking right into the creature. During those moments it seems much less dumb than it really is. AI is definitely something to improve on, but it turned out just as you'd expect given the amount of time I spent on it (very little).

• Map design: Another hacked together mess. If you were to know how the map actually works, you'd puke. Its design itself has a few serious issues: The right half of the map seems more enjoyable, mostly because there's platforms allowing you to move freely, while it's much harder to stay on the move on the left side. There's also a few spots in which you're completely safe, forever, and it might break the flow of the game, along with a couple of 'cheese spots' you can throw bombs off from, and farm for a high score with 0 risk. Balancing is hard, okay?

• Powerups: Could definitely be improved on. Some kind of UI showing how many powerups you've picked up so far, and of which kind, would allow the player to keep track of its progress more easily. I admittedly wish I would've had more time to throw in a few powerups more. The damage increasing powerup is particularly bad, in that there's no way for the player to tell the difference most of the time. On the other hand, the jump and speed powerups feel rather great and it's very easy to notice that you've taken them. In regards to the health powerup, I'm feeling lukewarm about it. It's very much necessary, but it feels too weak sometimes.

• Creatures: Again, could be improved on. For those of you unaware, there's three: The first one is a spider-like, small creature which deals an also small amount of damage, and is fairly easy to dispose of. However it's capable of jumping, and there's plenty of it. I believe this one is fairly well balanced, even if the AI needs quite a bit of love.
  The second creature is tanky in all senses of the word. It's a big triangle, and while it doesn't jump it deals considerably more damage than the previous creature, and has a lot of health. Easy to outrun, there's very few of them, and unless you've managed to gather a lot of power-ups throwing quite a few bombs at it is usually the answer. Final thoughts: The amount of points it drops isn't worth how boring it can be.
  The third and last creature is a hand. If any fireballs touch it, they will bounce back towards the player and damage it. They always try to stay at the same height you are to be able to do this better, and until you've collected a few health powerups, they insta-kill on touch. This is definitely a creature the game needed: Fireballs go through everything, except these hands, which make them bounce back and towards the player. It serves to keep the player from mindlessly spamming fireballs too often. Although it's 'weakness' was supposed to be the sword, it's not worth the risk and throwing a couple of bombs on it works just right.

What a ride, I think this covers most points and feedback, phew! There's clearly a lot that could be better, but it's far from awful and at least it can be fun.

There's only one week left to play and rate games! On July 8th at 7pm UTC, the ratings will be counted and the top 3 of the solo and team categories will be crowned!

In order to make as many games as possible receive a rating, games are now displayed in "rescue mode" which means games that need ratings will be displayed at the top!

Help your fellow Alakajam community members out and play and rate some of these games! Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve your game design skills, so let's make as many games as possible get some feedback!

Let's rescue some games!

A massive thanks to everbody who played and commented on my game!

For my first game jam this has been an amazing experience. I'm so proud I managed to put something together in time, although it could have done with a lot more added in.

I've loved playing everyone's games. Every single one was fun and creative. Can't believe how talented everyone is.
My favourite part was seeing everyone's individual take on the theme.

Well done everyone and thanks for everything!

I've put together a timelapse of how I created the art for my entry, Dirt.

Thanks to everybody who has played and commented on my game so far, the feedback has been really helpful. I've played almost all the entries that I can for the moment (Mac/web), but I will be borrowing some time on a Windows machine over the weekend to play the rest and really looking forward to it!

Our entry A.G. Hope has been updated! The original jam version has been patched with a couple major bugfixes, but we also took the time to make a post-compo of the game.

This new version is still far from our the original, way too ambitious goals, but brings the game on par with how we pictured it on the Sunday morning after refining the game design:

• Restored a fourth level (which got lost by mixing > and >=)
• Ships are powered off by default, requiring an EVA to dock them
• Fixed enemy spawn issues, making them more dangerous
• Some level balancing
• Minor tweaks eg. randomizing the ship rotations

Big thanks in passing to all who already reviewed our game! We're super happy with the game reception so far, and would love to hear thoughts on the new version.

Just need a couple more ratings! If youre in the same boat let me know what your game is and I'll check it out.
Been out of computer access for a couple days but want to play a few more games before the event ends!!

You can watch the highlight of the games here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/278430804

Another Alakajam Stream is happening Saturday! follow me on twitch for notifications and check the schedule for your local time on the channel page below the video player https://www.twitch.tv/tiger_j

Game links:

sunlight
infinite-potential
the-great-fire
dirt
rising-frost
endless-arena
bean-of-salvation