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!

Congratulations everyone for joining the jam :) You just made a game in 48 hours, which is an impressive achievement in itself!

Ratings phase

For the next two weeks, all entrants will be able to give ratings on other games. Take some time to play & rate games, and even better write some feedback about it! Constructive feedback is one of the best ways to learn and improve your game design skills, so please dish it out in buckets.

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.

On June 16th, at 7pm the final results will be released and the winners crowned :)

Unranked jam

Submissions are still open for unranked submissions: while those won't be officially ranked, they can expect as many people to play & comment on them. So, if you haven't finished your game in time, it's actually not too late to complete something! Game submissions will completely close Monday at 9pm UTC.

Click the image to try the 88wpm typing game :)

At this point the game is not really online, instead all replays are stored for future players to compete with. This way the game won't feel empty during the rating phase.

There's still a lot to do if I want to actually fit the theme (not mentioning the car sprites are terrible), but the core gameplay works which is nice. More details on my roadmap on the entry page

The 6th Alakajam has now started, good luck to all! Let's get cracking!

Game submission

The deadline depends on whether you want to enter the ranked or unranked category:

• Ranked (Solo or Team): Sunday, June 2nd 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 48 hours
• Unranked: Monday, June 3rd 9:00pm UTC, which means you have a bit more than 72 hours

For both categories, you have one additional hour after the deadline to create your game page, but we advise you do that in advance.

We all enjoyed the awesome opening ceremony created by @Aurel300 and @DanaePlays. If you missed it, you can still find it at Danae's Twitch channel.

Cool things to do during the jam

• Write blog posts: share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of #gamedevfood or gifs of gameplay (or cute animals!)
• Follow the Alakajam Twitter account and tweet about #alakajam
• Check out the streams and videos
• If you get bored, the Agar.io clone is still up, although probably dead right now. Let's do a meetup over there halfway through the jam, on Saturday 7pm UTC :)

But most importantly: have fun!

The new Alakajam! is finally approaching and will start on May 31st.

The goal of the event is simple: make a game, from scratch, in just a weekend. You can do this on your own, or in a team, you can be a seasoned pro or a total beginner. If you opt-in to the competition, you will be ranked against every other contestant!

Full schedule

Dates	Phase	Description
May 17	Theme submission & voting	You can submit theme ideas for the jam and vote for all other submissions.
May 24	Theme shortlist	Only the best 10 themes are kept. Rank them by order of preference in this final phase of theme voting.
May 31 6pm UTC	Countdown stream	DanaePlays and Aurel300 host an official stream on Twitch to launch the event!
May 31 7pm UTC	THE JAM!!!	Start making a game solo or as a team, and simply submit it before the deadline!
June 2	End of ranked jam	The main competition ends here, exactly 48 hours after the start time.
June 3	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.
June 16	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 ;)

The Alakajam! competitions let people make a video game from scratch in a week-end, then play and rate each other! All games are made around a theme chosen by the community.

Divisions

Anyone can enter in any of the following divisions:

• Solo, in which you make a whole gamalone 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, or feel like the rules are too restrictive for them, or simply did not finish their game in time.

The jam always starts on a Friday, 7pm UTC.

Rankings

After the jam, Solo and Team divisions will be ranked separately through community voting: any person who entered the event will be able to play, rate and comment other people's games for two weeks, until the final results are released. On each game you play, you will get to rate six aspects of game making:

Unranked games won't get ratings but can expect as much plays & feedback as the others.

What is allowed?

Solo/Team divisions

• Tools: All software is allowed without restriction. It is recommended though that your game engine supports targetting either HTML5, Windows or Linux, to make sure most contestants can play it.
• Code reuse: You are allowed to use/reuse any outside library or personal code made prior to the event, or code bits found from sources like StackOverflow or blogs. You can also prepare your project by initializing the sources in advance. However, you cannot work on a game you started before the event.
• Graphical asset reuse: You must make all your graphical assets during the event, even if you opt-out of the graphics category. Derivative work of existing assets (ie. you used some existing assets but significantly transformed them) is acceptable, as long as you list the original assets in your game page for the raters to appreciate. You are also allowed to use:
  • Third-party fonts and brushes ;
  • Procedurally generated assets ;
  • Your engine's default appearance for UI elements ;
  • Pre-made game author & engine splash screens.
• Audio asset reuse: You must make your audio assets during the event, even if you opt-out of the audio category. However:
  • You can reuse existing sounds for SFX. You can also reuse short samples for music (including drums and other sampled instruments), but reusing whole music tracks is not allowed ;
  • You can create assets from sound generation or speech synthesis tools.
• Post-jam changes: From the minute the jam ends, you are not allowed to add any features, assets or contents to your game. While you're supposed to have properly tested your game, stuff happens, so we do allow to:
  • Package or improve the packaging of your game ;
  • Port your game to other platforms ;
  • Fix bugs ;
  • Fix balance issues or annoyances but only if they're so terrible that people can't properly finish your game.

Those third-party assets exceptions are only allowed as long as you have the license to use them. Please check the licensing terms and in doubt, consult the author.

Unranked division

Since there is no ratings involved, the rules are much more relaxed. While the ranked divisions are only made for video games, card & board games are allowed here. The only rules are:

• All third-party assets are allowed as long as you have the license to use them.

There are additional rules if you submit an existing project of yours. These are fuzzy rules only aimed at preventing abusive self-promotion:

• You must spend a significant part of your week-end working on the game ;
• Use the game description to let people know what you did/did not make during the jam ;
• Make it easy to play the parts you worked on (eg. don't make testers play the full game to try your final boss!).

In case of doubts…

Obviously, the rules on post-jam changes don't cover every scenario (for instance you may realize the music volume is super low, or in-game instructions are wrong, etc.).

…So in those cases where you want to do something but it's unclear if you can, or not doing it seems unfair, do it, and mention what you did in your game description. After all, this is a completely informal competition, there's no prizes involved, we're just here to make games and have fun!

After the 5th Alakajam in February and a tournament in March, April 1st will be the start the next Kajam, this time under the presidence of the venerable @voxel!

But 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 making. For instance the previous jam was about "Hyper-casual gaming". Kajams are perfect to learn, experiment and improve your gamedev skills! Detailed rules here.

The topic of the 7th Kajam will be chosen by its host @voxel and announced upon the start of the event.

Follow us on Twitter or Reddit to stay updated!