It's official: the results for the 7th 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 next Alakajam! will take place in February 2020, with the exact date to be set in stone very soon. Since it is in a long time, we have a couple events in store before then.

The next event will be a gaming competition called AKJ Tournament, where the community is invited like last time to play & compete on jam games! If you want to submit your own game to the event, follow this link.

Thanks for being part of this fun event, we hope you had a nice time! See you next time :)

For the next two weeks, all entrants are be able to give ratings on other games. Take some time to play & rate games, and even better write some feedback about it! Getting constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve one's game design skills, so please dish it out in buckets. While people who didn't enter the event cannot rate games, they can still post reviews.

By rating & commenting (even on Unranked entries), you will gain Karma that will make your game more visible to others. A high Karma gives you more chances to get ratings yourself and reach the minimum of 10 to be classified. Otherwise, you will not get a final ranking!

On October 6th, at 7pm UTC the final results will be released and the winners crowned :)

Go go go! Play and rate games!

What is the November Challenge?

This event is meant to get you motivated for releasing and marketing a game (or any game related product) during the month of November. If you release your project and eventually earn $1, you win! The aim is to use - and hopefully improve - your release and marketing skills, and hopefully give you the pride of making some money off of something you made.

What can my product be?

Your product can be a game or anything game related. This includes tools, assets, etc… And it can be a project you have already worked on, like a prior game jam entry that just lacks some polish and contents for release.

Do I have to start the project in November?

No. You can complete an old project or start a completely new one! The only objective is to release during the month of November. You don't have to earn the money in November either, winning later is still winning.

What qualifies as a win?

The amount of money earned is somewhat arbitrary, but if you want to set an amount, you can use 1 unit of your local currency. The goal is really just to learn about the release and marketing process, and ideally make some money off of your product.

How does the community participate?

People are encouraged to give feedback on each other's products. If your releases have an upfront price, we suggest exchanging keys between entrants instead over at Discord. Even if you didn't get someone's product, you can still give them feedback on their marketing efforts!

When is the November Challenge?

As the name implies, it's during the whole month of November. You have until the end of the month to submit your project here. Then when the month ends:

1. The first week of December will be dedicated to exchanging feedback on each other's releases
2. The winners will be invited to report back to be added on the Winner List :D

Share a tweet-long story using as many themes as you can. The winner will be chosen on stream by TigerJ!

Post your story as an answer to this tweet to join the challenge.

Hello from France!

We're finally gathering again our team of friends that first worked together for LD43 (see pic on the right for the resulting game).

The Dream Team

• @BalBoom: Game design
• @Thrainsa: Code
• @Wan: Art & audio

BalBoom and Thrainsa last worked together for the 5th Alakajam yielding the Trinity puzzle game. I'm also a regular partner of Thrainsa, just check our profiles to see how many jams we joined together :)

Our plans

The goal this time is to make a platformer (probably not tile-based), the kind of stuff that is easy to make when taking advantage of Unity's physics engine and its other native tools. That would mean less time writing code, more with the level editor making actual contents.

The idea is inspired by a short game (see gif below) made back in 2017 for the very last MiniLD held by Ludum Dare. I had lots of fun making it with very little code: most of the time was spent drawing random shapes on Photoshop, importing them into Unity and building levels out of them. Reusing that approach as a starting point would be great to quickly get BalBoom up to speed as our level designer.

Good luck to all!

The next full-scale Alakajam! will take place on the September 20-22 week-end! We will post the detailed schedule early on that month. Book the date :)

To make sure not to miss the next events, you can also follow us either on Twitter or Reddit.

Alakajam is a non-profit organization, which means we run elections every year to choose a new board! It's also an opportunity to recap the year, so everyone is welcome to assist it. The meeting will be held on our Discord server, this Thursday 22 August at around 7pm UTC. More info in the pic below!

The concept

My CCJ entry will be a website inspired by a writing project (I won't dare say novel) I've been working on for fun for a few months now. Because that project has some environmental overtones, it inspired this weird little idea set in the same universe.

There is no game, just a small static website with hyperlinks that you can freely explore. Checking the different pages will let you assemble the pieces of this small SF world.

Current state, 24 hours before deadline

The website was created in an evening and is already functional, with about 1500 words (5 to 10 minutes read).

Now, before the end of the jam I would still like to expand it a bit, give it character and maybe little easter eggs. Its presentation is quite rough, which is done on purpose as a reference to the early days of the internet, but I fear it could make people bored by the walls of text… I'll see whether and how I can improve this.

Being away from home this week I'm aiming for something small, so here's a couple rough game ideas I had to put aside, feel free to find inspiration in them:

Graygreen City (Strategy/Puzzle)

The player has to transform a polluted city into a greener one. The view is top-down, tile-based. The gameplay consists in spending slowly refilling money by replacing tiles from certain types into other types, the goal being to reinvent the way cities are organized in order to pollute less.

• Tile types: Road, Housing, Pavement, Offices, Shops, Parks.
• Variables:
  • Pollution (increases with cars on roads, parks reduce it, you win if you get to zero)
  • Productivity (increases with the time people spend at work, the higher the more money you get)
  • Anger (increases when people take longer to reach work/market, lowers with time, you get fired/lose if maxed out)
• Units:
  • Car (moves fast on roads, cannot go to a tile occupied by another car)
  • Pedestrian (moves slowly on the pavement, can overlap other pedestrians)
• Citizen AI: 1 housing tile = 1 citizen, attached to a random Office on the map (rerolled if deleted), and the nearest market to its home. Each citizen loops between "Home until 6am > Work until 12am > Home until 6pm > Shop until 12pm". Can either move as a car or a pedestrian, but will always use the car if it is faster than walking.

Comments : It might take a while to get right in terms of balancing. The AI should be fun to code but a bit long to complete. And yes, you can probably win by replacing everything with parks, maybe the city population at victory time is your final score?

The Path to Laughing with Salad (Walking sim or Text game)

This could work either as a walking simulator (made with RPG Maker for instance), or simply a simple interactive story. Something visual like a top down RPG view with some interactions would probably work best though.

The player goes through a typical day. The first day plays itself without any choices, the protagonist having certain habits. A certain event makes them suddenly willing to change their routine for the better good. Throughout the next day and onwards the player is faced with multiple difficult choices. What's better for the environment might have a negative impact in the short term (especially in terms of comfort), but turn out helpful in the long run:

• Going to work by car or bike: If you pick the bike, at first you arrive late and sweaty. You fix the first problem by setting the alarm clock earlier the next day, and the sweatiness by preparing a change of clothes. After a few days like this you get fit and don't even sweat anymore.
• Buying transformed or fresh foods: The food you cook yourself is terrible at first, but you get better (reading recipes in the evening can help). You also have to choose the quantities you buy, and will most probably fail with rotten leftovers or not enough food at first.
• Bring homemade food to work: Linked to the previous item. If you don't bring food, you'll have to choose between an expensive place or one whose packaging lead to a lot of waste.
• Turn the heat up at home or not: If you keep the heat low, you get annoyed by the cold but eventually get into the habit of wearing warmer clothes at home.

Various possible endings to that once the player has reached a green enough lifestyle. Maybe something to hint at an apparent uselessness of all the effort when there are industries nearby blasting waste at a different scale…

It's official: the results for the 6th 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, we've got a short survey you should definitely check out.

Upcoming events

The next Alakajam! will take place on the 20-22 September 2019 week-end, book the date! Since September is in a long time, we have a couple events in store before then:

• On July 12nd, we'll start the 4rd AKJ Tournament, where the community is invited like last time to play & compete on jam games! If you want to submit your own game to the event, follow this link.

• The whole month of August will be dedicated to a new Kajam. Its host will choose a topic that we'll be invited to study and make a game around!

Have a nice summer everyone, we hope to see you in the upcoming events!