The dates of the 10th Alakajam! are announced :) If you're a true hipster you can even join it now.

After 24 hours, the streamer competition is now over!

Browse the final leaderboard

Congratulations to @Birdwards for winning the competition. Watching the streamers play the award winners live was fun, so thank you guys for participating. More than that, all the broadcasts throughout the event (from sharing jam progress to playtesting the games) really added a lot to this ScoreSpace x Alakajam!, so big thanks to all who streamed at any point.

Final words

The ScoreSpace x Alakajam! event now comes to an end, and I'd like to give special thanks to @scorespace (alias "KB") for partnering with us, and the ScoreSpace community as a whole for having us host the event on alakajam.com. We hope you all had fun, whether you're an Alakajam regular, a ScoreSpace veteran or just a random guy joining either for the first time. If you have any feedback, feel free to leave a word on this comment section or on our Discord server.

Our next major event will be the 10th Alakajam! (woo round number), and it will be held during the September 18-20 week-end.

We hope to see you then, have a nice summer!

With the big red button currently linking to jam results, streamers may miss the tournament-related links, so see below how you'll find them as new links in the event header :)

If you haven't subscribed yet as a streamer, it's not too late!

1. Create an account on the site and join the event
2. Go to your and set up your entry as a streamer
3. Start posting high scores to see you appear on the leaderboard!

After 5 days of intense playtesting and rating games, the results of the jam are out! Congratulations to the winners :) We also noticed there's a lot of competition on the games already, with 281 high scores already posted on the entries, before the tournament has even started!

Streamer competition

Speaking of tournament, here are the talented winners of the special awards:

• Solo Developer's Choice: Bondstones ! by @benjamin
• Team Developer's Choice: Hello, Operator? by @dorkulon, @cloakedninjas and @treslapin
• Streamer's Choice: Rangers of the Cursed Land by @MatchaMaze and Oliminor

For the next 24 hours, all registered streamers are invited to livestream themselves playing those three game and climb on the leaderboard:

Streamers list | Live high scores | Live leaderboard

Feel free to also join the fun by registering from the event dashboard.
Good luck to the streamers and let's all have fun watching them!

Congrats on everyone who entered the jam, we now have a whopping 51 games to discover and rate! High fives to everyone who managed to submit a game, and also to those who could not due to technical issues, time constraints, etc. Making a game in such a short timeframe is always a challenge.

Ratings phase

For the next five days, all of you who submitted an entry or registered as streamers will be able to play, rate and comment on the games for five days. All games supporting high scores will also let you compete and post your best scores with screenshots as proof :)

Please take that chance to actually review, comment on and rate games: the more you contribute to this phase, the higher you karma will be… And having a high karma makes you more visible on the game list. Only games who received enough ratings will be in the final standings.

Special awards and competition

At the end of the ratings phase, three things will happen:

1. Jam results are released: the final ratings and standings are published, and we'll celebrate the winners of both categories
2. Special awards winners are announced: the best Solo and Team games supporting high scores will be chosen for the streamer competition, with the third game being elected by streamers themselves!
3. The streamer competition starts: as soon as the special awards are revealed, a competition starts for 24 hours. It will use the same high score system you can already use, with an additional leaderboard on top attributing points to streamers according to how well they placed. Pick a streamer to root for and expect some cool streams to follow from Saturday to Sunday evening.

See the relevant parts of the rules page for more details on how the awards and competition work.

With the theme now revealed, the ScoreSpace x Alakajam! has started! Good luck to all! And don't forget to support high scores for a chance to win the special awards :)

Big thanks to @DanaePlays and @Aurel300 for hosting the awesome launch stream! If you missed it, you can still watch the replay on her Twitch channel. If you like The Elder Scrolls, you will also enjoy Danae's regular streams, where she usually goes exploring the huge world of Morrowind.

Submission times

You can create your game page at any time during the jam…and update it as you want after it's created, so better create it early! Unlike past Alakajam events, all divisions (ranked or unranked) will end at the same time: Monday June 22d, 7:00pm UTC, which means you have 72 hours. A bonus hour is granted for late entries to create their page.

What about high scores?

Supporting high scores is not mandatory. You can safely ignore the streamer competition and enter the jam, and even why not win it. However, this event is a great opportunity to have a number of players compete on your game, and streamers in particular livestreaming it.

In order to qualify for the special awards and the streamer competition, your game must support high scores, in the forms of a visible score that can be captured as a screenshot. You must also toggle two checkboxes on your game submission page: one for enabling high scores, and another one granting us permissions to use the game for the tournament.

See the complete rules (section "Awards and perks") for additional details on how this works.

Cool things to do during the jam

• Stream your development process. Join the event as a streamer from your dashboard to let everyone know about it, and possibly get featured on the front page during the week-end! This will also have the side effect to let you enter the streamer competition.
• Write a blog post: Share your thoughts on the theme, post your progress, images of food or gifs of cute animals. You can also free to use posts for advertising live jam streams.
• Come relax on the Discord server, tweet about #alakajam and/or follow the alakajam Twitter account.
• Initialize your game page early!

Everyone have a nice week-end, and see you on the other side ;)

Alakajam! is soon reaching a pretty round number, will that mean anything special? Nothing is announced yet, but it surely is a chance to look back at three year of jam history for our small but peaceful community.

See you on the 18-20 September 2020 week-end for that milestone event!

The game jam multiverse is collapsing! In June, Alakajam! and ScoreSpace will join forces to offer you a special event.

For 72 hours, from Friday to Monday, all entrants are invited to make a game. Teams or solo devs, beginners and professionals are all welcome to participate. On top of that, in a unique twist to game jams, ScoreSpace brings in the idea of making streamers compete on your jam games.

Overview

Detailed schedule

Rules

See the full rules for the ScoreSpace x Alakajam event here.

How to enter

All you need to do is:

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

An itch.io event will also be created for those who want to submit their game there. However, the ratings phase will only take place here, so make sure to also submit your game on alakajam.com to be part of the official competition!

You may be wondering why little has been announced since the last AKJ Tournament. Behind the scenes, we are actually preparing the 9th Alakajam! to be a special event, and could not announce too much before it is set in stone.

Things are taking shape, so I can tell that the June event should see Alakajam! team up with another community of gamedev enthusiasts :) The two communities make a nice match, as our respective twists to the game jam formula can blend together nicely and make the whole event bigger and more fun. Expect the detailed schedule of this special jam to be announced in the next few days, when all details are finetuned!

The 4 web games we'll compete on for the next couple weeks are revealed! Featuring the two winners from the last Alakajam, I hope you'll enjoy our selection.

If you've been part of a tournament before, you may have notice a decrease in the number of games: it's an experiment to see how featuring less games may impact event participation.

How the event works

Until April, Sunday 5th, everyone is invited to play and post high scores on our selection of 4 games from the 8th Alakajam. Using screenshots as proof, you can compete in those games' leaderboards for points.

For each game, players are awarded a number of points for being in the top 10, as per the table below. The players with the highest total scores are shown on a global leaderboard throughout, and at the end we'll announce the winner and runners up!

About the ongoing pandemic

Don't worry, this won't be a note saying that "Alakajam will continue its activities despite blah blah", nor a reminder to wash your hands with soap regularly.

With the containment now in place in a lot of countries, it seems like quite some people are fighting with anxiety about the whole situation. To be honest, in my case I'm now a week into containment and I haven't slept that well since it all started. With sudden unemployment (hopefully temporarily), I'm currently spending my days at home with a young kid to entertain and take care of. On the plus side, being a full time parent may keep me too busy and tired to fully realize the situation :P

I would just like to take this chance to remind you that it's perfectly normal to experience stress in this situation, as we're facing a lot of uncertainty with what's going on, and of course what's left to come. Hopefully for a large majority of us this will be remembered as a few months of worry, boredom and maybe a few days of flu. In the meantime I'd just like to share some valuable advice I've found and felt like sharing. If you would like to read more, see this for instance for a more detailed read.

• While it's important to stay informed, don't spend too much time checking the news and social media. I feel those can be a big source of anxiety. Honestly, if you already know how to limit risks of getting infected/infecting others, there's no point in spending all day reading about the virus - nor reading people talk about it on Twitter.
• Stay in touch with family and friends, preferably with actual phone & video calls.
• Put some exercise in your daily activities, and if you have a balcony or private yard, spend time in it.
• Consider looking for ways to help people. Helping includes sharing useful information, clearing up rumors and bad advice that gets spread around, and calming things down when friends & relatives start to panick about stuff.
• Finally, don't forget that there's only so much we can do about the situation. Beyond doing our best to follow local health recommendations, the most valuable skill is just patience.

Best wishes to you all, take care and keep jamming!