The 14th edition of our 48 hour game jam starts on Friday February 25th!

As always, the event is about making a game, from nothing, in a weekend. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. If you opt-in to the competition, you will get to be ranked against every other contestant! Or if you prefer a more relaxed setting, the unranked jam will still give you an opportunity to get plays and comments.

Schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
February 11 , 7pm UTC	Theme submission and voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
February 18, 7pm UTC	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
February 25, 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
February 27, 7pm UTC	End of ranked jam	The main competition ends here, exactly 48 hours after the start time. Submissions will remain open for an additional hour after the deadline.
February 28,10pm UTC	End of unranked jam	If you want to go for a relaxed weekend - or need more time - you can create a game in the 72 hours of the unranked jam.
March 13, 7pm UTC	Results	After two weeks during which all entrants are invited to play, rate and comment on other peoples games… The results are released and the winners crowned!

Rules

There are three divisions:

- Solo, in which you make a whole game alone in 48 hours
- Team, in which any number of persons can gather to make a game in 48 hours
- Unranked, a more open division which grants about 72 hours to finish the game. Useful for those not interested in the competitive aspect of the event, want to work on an existing project of theirs, or simply did not finish their game in time.

See the full rules for the Alakajam.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

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

A lot of participants also post an "I am in" blog post presenting themselves or their team before the event. Describe what tools and frameworks and engines you will use to create your awesome game! Which themes do you like? Let us and the community know!

If you can, feel free to spread the word about the jam - the more we are, the merrier! glhf ;)

Hi everyone,

this Saturday (11th December), 20:15 CET BloodyOrange would like to play the games of the feedback fortnight on her twitch channel https://www.twitch.tv/oobloodyorangeoo Would be nice if you join. 🙂

Hi there Jammers!

The Deadline for the Kajam is approaching fast. Please submit your games until 2021-06-04 21:00 Berlin time.
Please add some instructions on how to set up your game for multiplayer session (e.g. which ports to forward (udp/tcp) of if specific config files need to be adjusted).

On 2021-06-05 we will have a dedicated gaming session where you are invited to join us in the Alakajam discord "general" voice channel to play all the submissions together. Of course you can also join if you did not participate in the Kajam. We will start at 18:00 Berlin time. Check this website for your local timezone.

So everyone: let's add the finishing touches to our games and then have a great time together. Looking forward to talk to all of you in person.

Hi there,

So there is finally some progress. Not so much on the gameplay side, but the underlying mechanics are getting fleshed out quite nicely.

As we are aiming for a SHMUP game, the client really needs to feel responsive. This will be achieved by some clever client side prediction. This will only roughly be described here. For a full introduction, I recommend you this awesome tutorial here.
Basically the server but also every client runs on it's own pace and a slow client should not block the server or other clients. This means that some sort of lock-step implementation will not work for us.
Due to network lag, the client will always be behind the server and there is basically nothing that could prevent it. The idea is that the client predicts the movement for a certain frame 60. Then it sends out the input state for this frame to the server. Simultaneously the gamestate for frame 55 has arrived (due to network lag this will always lag some frames behind).
The solution now is that the player locally stores the game state as well as the input state for the past frames.
The number of stored input frames as well as the framerate determines what input lags you can compensate.

If a mismatch between the locally computed frame 55 and the received frame 55 from the server is detected, the client code now needs to roll back its simulation to frame 55 and re-simulate the input up to frame 60. This will then be used to display the player position.

To simulate network trouble, you can use a tool like clumsy. This allows to add arbitrary lag, dropped packets, throttle, limited bandwidth or even message corruption to your in or outgoing network packets. It works for ipv4 and ipv6 and supports udp and tcp. This is very handy for testing purposes.

So I am joining the Multiplayer Kajam.

Tools that will be used:

• C++
• My self-written Jam Template, based on SFML
• Visual Studio & Visual Studio Code
• Aseprite for graphics

We will join in a team of three

• Thunraz
• BloodyOrange
• and Laguna

We started yesterday evening and already had some trouble with our ISPs. One was configured to use only IPv4, the other was configured for only IPv6 (with an ipv4 tunnel). We found a way around that, where the only restriction is that I cannot be the host, but we can work around that as local testing is still possible.

I wish everyone best of luck for the jam!

The Kajam is live! Let's work on some awesome multiplayer games!

The Kajam will run until 2021-06-04. On 2021-06-05 we will have a common gaming session in the Alakajam Discord. You can of course also join for the gaming session if you did not participate in this Kajam.

Tell your story

Are you working solo or in a team? Do you plan to work only on specific weekends or throughout the complete time of the jam? What are the tools you are using? It would also be awesome to hear about the issues you encounter during the Kajam and especially how you solve them? Are you using lockstep or some kind of interpolation?
And most importantly: What game are you making? Did you pick a round based gameplay? Some strategy or some fase paced action gameplay?

New to the jam?

Check out the original jam announcement here

The Theme for this Kajam is “Remote Multiplayer”. This relaxed, month-long event will start on 2021-05-07 and last until 2021-06-04. There will be no ratings after the jam, but a dedicated gaming session on 2021-06-05.

Please find the keynote on YouTube and SoundCloud

What does “remote multiplayer” mean?

By definition multiplayer means that more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Remote means that you can play together over some sort of network and that you don’t have to sit next to each other.

What might sound as a daunting endeavour, is the chance to start thinking about games you would normally not do on a GameJam. Most GameJam entries specialize on gameplay mechanics for one player or are dedicated couch multiplayer games.
However in the time of continuing lockdowns when you can not meet with your friends as you would normally do, multiplayer games are a great way to spend some time together.

This Kajam is all about multiplayer.
Let’s learn about the technical details of multiplayer games, like network protocols and client/server communication!
Let’s make a game that you would normally never try on any GameJam!
And most importantly: Let’s have some fun while creating and playing multiplayer games together!

What are the rules?

For this Kajam you can work solo or as a team.
You have four weeks to create and submit your entry, starting on Friday, 2021-05-07 and lasting until Saturday 2021-06-05.
Every Language, Framework or Engine is allowed.
You can use third party assets and are even allowed to add multiplayer functionality to an already finished game!

Detailed rules here

Now, start your engines and join this Kajam!

What is a Kajam?

Kajam competitions are month-long events in which people make a small video game focusing on a specific aspect of game development. They're a perfect opportunity to learn, experiment and level-up your gamedev skills!

This gaming session sounds great! How can I join?

Thank you! The gaming session will happen after the Kajam on Saturday 2021-06-05. We will meet online at the Alakajam! Discord server and have fun playing the games which were created during the jam and have a great time together.

Please find my raycasting game Burning Glyphs

7dfps

I always wanted to take part in the 7dfps. I always played shooters. My first one was DukeNukem3D, which a friend showed me and I was blown away.
When I received the Game Engine Blackbook for Wolfenstein 3D as a birthday present, I knew that I don't have any more excuses. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book. It is written very well and in an entertaining way, contains a lot of helpful explanations and also was proofchecked. This is important, because a lot of tutorials on the internet contain minor or major math errors, inconsistent or confusing variable naming and so on. I have been there, and I have found my missing minus sign just due to this book.

So 7dfps it should be. I only learned some dasy into 7dfps that the next kajam will be about raycasting. So bear with me for submitting the same game twice.

raycasting

The raycasting was written from scratch, and I have to say: "That is not so easy to get right!". It took me a lot of drawings and scribbles on paper. But eventually I managed.

c++ in 2020?

I am working as a c++ software developer and c++ is in fact my preferred language to write games. Lucky for me I was working on a so called JamTemplate which was lately being able to compile to web via emscripten.
I had to try this out! It wasn't easy, especially getting multiple libraries (SFML, SDL) combined in one framework. Burning Glyphs was so to speak the full rehersal and I am pretty happy how it turned out. Of course there are still a lot of quirks and issues left, but I am confident that they will vanish throughout the next projects. And to be honest, witnessing your c++ code being executed in a browser is pretty awesome :D

Hey there,

I am really looking forward to this Alakajam Feedback Fortnight event! Unfortnunately I missed the first FF event, but this time I submitted an entry! For LD41 DevilLime, xXBloodyOrange and I worked on a mashup between a Tower Defense and a Clicker game: Grantchester Meadows which is now awaiting your feedback!

I am also looking forward to play your entries. I will try and give detailed feedback.

Of course I will join the next Alakajam!

Although some friends are celebrating their wedding on the next weekend, I will try and sneak some hours of awesome gamedev into the schedule.

I will be using Haxe and HaxeFlixel and probably aim for an HTML5 build. If I find time for graphics, I will use Aseprite.

Regardig the themes: I am awefully sorry that "little robot workers" as well as "giant robots" were eliminated during the voting phase. However, I see a good chance for some of the themes to do something at least related to robots. :D

Other than that, I am really looking forward to joining ths alakajam and of course to play all your awesome games!

gl, hf and of course: see you on the other side!
Laguna