There's just an hour left to vote! If you haven't already voted, you really should. If you have, though, why not try to improve your score on Prison Breakpoint? :D

To get you motivated, here are the top 5 scores for each level so far ;)

Level 1

Player	Score
Wan	100
Thomas	100
Rain	100
vede	100
kdrnic	100

Level 2

Player	Score
Bubba	100
Wan	98
vede	98
Thomas	96
Ferri	96

Level 3

Player	Score
Bubba	100
Thomas	97
Wan	96
vede	93
Aurel	82

Level 4

Player	Score
Wan	215
Thomas	210
Ferri	206
vede	192
Bubba	142

Level 5

Player	Score
Wan	100
Bubba	100
Ferri	99
Thomas	94
vede	92

Level 6

Player	Score
Bubba	139
Wan	138
Thomas	134

Level 7

Player	Score
Wan	200
Thomas	186
Bubba	144

A remake nobody asked for

I'm planning to submit my MiniLD 74 entry, Cooperoids for the first AKJ tournament. Not happy with the way the game currently looks, though, I'm releasing a brand new edition. Introducing Cooperoids: Tournament Edition (oooOOooh).

In brief, expect (hopefully) fixed audio, better graphics and more intense gameplay (full description here). Enjoy! :)

And so I have jettisoned my fragile game, Prison Breakpoint, into the internet wilderness, ready to be devoured by a howling mob of people with probably totally valid criticisms.

I'll write a longer reflective post after the voting stage, but these are my initial thoughts on the game.

• I had to crunch pretty hard last night to turn what was a congealed blob of JavaScript spaghetti into something resembling a game, but am happy with the end result. It's definitely basic in some ways (the art styles are mixed and incoherent; there's no SFX or music), but it does have a reasonable level of polish.

• Because I lost a big chunk of time, there's not a whole lot of AI. The whole game is about writing some AI, which is enough to get into the jam, but it still feels like a cop-out. I would have preferred more AI in this game.

• The elephant in the room: I suspect this game is a bit too inaccessible. It's not particularly hard, but… you have to read a manual. Seriously. What the heck was I thinking?

Voting begins! Hooray!

What's next

It's the best part of the jam—where we play the games and most importantly, give each other a well-deserved pat on the back and some delicious constructive feedback. Mmmmm, yummy.

The theme is AI, but remember we're allowing entries where the player writes the AI. Also try to bear in mind that this is a difficult and quite unpredictable thing to code. Most important of all, be nice and constructive in your feedback. Try to imagine the kind of feedback that will help a person grow as a gamedev. Finally, have fun playing all the free games! :)

What to do if you haven't finished

Don't worry: we're leaving submissions open until the end of the jam, i.e. for another week. Do finish as quickly as you can, though, so people can play and vote on your game!

I finished my Kajam entry… and I managed to do it before the sun rose.

I'll figure out how to upload it—probably to Itch—tomorrow (still a few hours left before the deadline), but for now here's a screenshot. I hope this piques your curiosity :)

The GPU skinning I've been working on is going well—but not that well. I decided a couple of days ago that I need to prioritise finishing something for the Kajam, and then continue working on the OpenGL stuff. So I've started working on a new game in Phaser, but trying to reuse as much as possible from the other game (mostly the artwork).

I re-rendered the model from before, and did some tidying up in GIMP to produce this instead:

I'm about to embark on coding the animation stuff; but first I needed a nice animation to test it out with, so here it is. Originally I was animating the arms too, but it seems to look more (or less, perhaps?) natural this way; it's a robot, after all :D

I expect that adding animations to the game will take a couple of days, but once it's done my crappy texturing the sky is the limit for the graphics in this game!

I got my model loading working today. It's been a bit of work but my OpenGL understanding has increased massively. I've also learned what happens if you specify the wrong image format ^^

I'm in (somewhat obviously)!

I'd like to make something top-down and tinker with some adversarial AI. I've been hacking around with OpenGL quite a lot in recent weeks, and would love to turn my delicious spaghetti codebase into a game for this jam. Time might be a little tight as it's very rough and incomplete, so if that fails, my back-up plan is to use Old Faithful and whip something up in JS.

Would also be nice to turn my abysmal 1/3 attendance record into a pitiful 2/4. We'll see!

Rise of the robots

Improvise, adapt, and overcome! Or at least, tell a computer how to do that. Yes, the 4th Kajam's theme is Artificial Intelligence.

AI has been used in games since at least the early '70s, becoming more popular with classics like Space Invaders (1978) and Pac-Man (1980). Genres —like RTS and FPS—from the '90s brought the development of AI in games to a new level, and with more recent titles like the Half-Life episodes we started to see quite convincing cooperative AI.

Your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to create a game using AI in some way. It doesn't have to CRUSH ALL HUMANS be particularly complicated: if you're stuck for ideas, try tweaking your path-finding algorithms; creating a novel NPC; or just making a really hard-to-beat opponent. If that doesn't suit you, other takes on the theme are very welcome too! (Edit: In particular if you'd rather make a game where the player has to write the AI, that's also fine!)

Schedule

• March 29th - April 23rd: The jam. Make a small gam, trying to focus on AI in ways you might not have done before. Spend as much or as little time as you want, and work with others or alone. There are no rules, so just try to have fun!
• April 23rd - April 30th: Feedback time! For a whole week, all entrants can play and rate other people's games. Try to give encouragement for things that went well, and useful suggestions on what to improve.
• April 30th: The results!

For inspiration

• How to simplify your AI code with Finite State Machines – an introduction to state machines and how to model simple, deterministic behaviour of AI
• The Monte Carlo Method for Game AI – for finding good-looking moves in a somewhat random fashion, useful when there are just too many things that an AI can do
• What Makes Good AI? – some considerations for what a player could appreciate in enemy AI
• A* search algorithm – extremely popular algorithm for pathfinding, navigation, or even finding "paths" in other kinds of state spaces
• Artificial Intelligence in Games – a summary of various kinds of AIs you might want to use for different game genres
• Artificial Intelligence in Board Games – simple techniques for AI in the board game genre
• Video games where people matter? The strange future of emotional AI – for more story-rich, emotionally-focused games