UPDATE: The jam is on, and the theme is “You can’t see everything!“

With two months having passed since the last LD, some of you might miss jamming already… Well good news, the 2nd edition of the Alakajam! event starts soon!

If you’re free on February 23-25th, you might be interested in joining our young community for a week-end of jamming:

• The two weeks prior to the jam are dedicated to an original 2-step voting system (Week 1 = submission/voting, Week 2 = shortlist ranking
• The jam itself lasts 48 hours, both for solo & team entrants, with start/end times suited to Europeans (7pm GMT)
  
• Two weeks of community voting then take place until the winners are announced!

Our first jam back in September was great fun, ending with 50 games and some really awesome entries! We hope to see you there

 Last Friday started the 1st Kajam, a regular event inspired by MiniLDs. The main difference with MiniLDs is that Kajams are actually rated competitions, focused on learning a specific aspect of game development.

For this month, the topic is Game Juice! The goal is to make a small game with the best Game Juice (or Game Feel) as possible.

Schedule

• Oct. 13th – Nov. 19th: The jam. You have around one month to work on your game and submit your entry! (see also the event rules)
• Nov. 19th – Nov. 26th: The rating phase. For one week, all entrants will rate how juicy the other games are – and that’s it: no Overall, no Originality ratings, just Juiciness!
• Nov. 26th: The definitive rankings of the most juicy games are announced

Resources

A list of videos and articles on game juice/game feel is available on the announcement post.

Bonus: 1st Alakajam results

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We are just a few hours away from the 1st Alakajam, a new 48 hour long competition hosted on a dedicated website. This is your last chance to join the launch of this young but enthusiastic community! We’re planning for around 50 entries this week-end, which looks just about the right size to get to know each other, yet big enough for proper competition.

You can still help choose the final theme by ranking the theme top 10. See you there!

Update: The theme is ALCHEMY!

The new Alakajam! site, founded by Ludum Dare veterans is hosting its first competition on the 22-24 September week-end! Since it’s only two weeks from now, we have just launched the theme selection phase for the event. In a variant from Ludum Dare, people can simultaneously suggest theme ideas and rate them. Come & contribute your theme ideas!

Theme submission/voting page

If you were to reinvent Ludum Dare, what rating categories would you pick?

We have a poll going on currently at Alakajam!, for a new 48-hour long competition held in between Ludum Dare events. Among the topics we’re trying to figure out, we’re wondering what would be a good improvement over the current rating  categories, which are as we speak: Overall, Graphics, Audio, Fun, Innovation, Theme, Mood & Humor.

If you have suggestions, make your voice heard by answering this quick form! Thanks for your contribution

EDIT: The submissions are now closed, thank you everyone! You can see the results over there. If you’re interested in joining us, the first competition will be held on the 22-24 September week-end, see you there!

Alakajam! competition categories form

Feedback Friends! results

1910 games have been made during the LD36 jam, and in the weeks that followed, they gathered no less than 18983 19000 comments! Congratulations everyone. While there’s no winner everyone is a winner due to the lack of ratings, we just unlocked for you a couple new ways to browse the LD36 entries:

Of course you can also still browse games randomly or through the usual Ludum Dare 36 event page.

Dare to play: the best of LD36

Some of our streamers released compilation videos curating their favorite games, go check them out!

Larry Chupacabra

Molpe the First Siren

Lists

• Best of Ludum Dare #36 – Top 20 by SamuelSousa
• Jam Favorites: Ludum Dare 36 by Jupiter Hadley

Did you make a best of video/article of your own? Let us know in the comments!

(NB. trophy icons are made by Patacorow)

Using the data scraped for Feedback Friends, I just ran a little query to answer some questions like “Who are the oldest LD36 submitters?” or “I am older than the average submitter?”.

Note: by “old” I mean “who subscribed for the longest time”, which is easy enough to figure out by looking at UIDs, those incremental, public numbers assigned to each account. You can check your own UID by looking at the URL of your game.

For instance, the elder of LD36 is Jovoc (UID 34), who apparently was here since the very first Ludum Dare, and still takes part regularly! Here’s the top 10:

+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+
| rank | pct  | uid    | author                        |
+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+
|    1 |    0 |     34 | jovoc                         |
|    2 |    0 |     55 | negativegeforce               |
|    3 |    0 |    169 | joss                          |
|    4 |    0 |    484 | Sébastien Bernery             |
|    5 |    0 |    547 | ladybenko                     |
|    6 |    0 |    627 | Atridas                       |
|    7 |    0 |    680 | Arowx                         |
|    8 |    0 |   1012 | Tange                         |
|    9 |    0 |   1049 | AtkinsSJ                      |
|   10 |    1 |   1066 | jplur                         |
+------+------+--------+-------------------------------+

View the complete list on Pastebin

You can use this list to find your own name and figure out where you rank in terms of seniority 😉 I for instance am among the 7% oldest members who took part in the event, my first event being LD24 [/bragging]. Also:

• The median user is from LD33
• At least 1/4 of the users are new accounts who never took part in an event before, LD or MiniLD
• As shown by Tijn’s work on past events, the turnover is especially big for the Jam category, which can be explained (in part) by the fact that teams come and go with each event, often requiring people to create new accounts.

Previously, in Ludum Dare…

In case you missed it, LD36 will be a little bit unusual, in that it won’t feature ratings.

To bring everyone up to date, the reason behind that is that PoV, when announcing his break from running the August LD, has also raised concerns over the ratings system. He recommended not to use it for this event, and following a poll made by Sorceress, we voted in majority to follow his advice.

Now, some of us really wanted to still find a cool incentive for players to play each other’s games. Ludum Dare may be enjoyed for the competition, but getting loads of playtesting and sharing feedback with each other is also a great part of what makes the event special.

So here comes our little experiment:

Click the logo to access the mini-site. Not me, the logo… Ok ok you can click me

The Feedback Friends mini-site

Here’s how it works:

Right after LD36 ends, you’ll be able to use this little thing to browse games and find those who need feedback the most. The more games you comment on, the higher you’ll be featured! The goal, of course, is to make sure everyone gets some comments on their games, and reward the more active commenters with more feedback.

If you’re curious, you can already browse the games from Ludum Dare 35 to get an idea of how it works.

Open beta: MiniLD #69

Starting today, the mini-site will be open for the current MiniLD in order to test things out, gather opinions and make some tweaks.

Please share your suggestions & bug reports in the comments. And if you’re curious, feel free to check the Github repository!

[Update] The Ludum Dare world map

Additional announcement: Will Edwards is looking for contributors (artists/programmers) to upgrade a project he made for LD30.

It featured a nice map of the world, where people could place their entries and find their neighbors. It also encouraged commenting on other games, which is exactly what we’re trying to do. It would be a nice way to complement the Feedback Friends, so if you have some skills & free time, you know what to do!

Here’s how our time management looks like for the Squ Jam entry!

Here’s a quick list of lessons learnt:

• Art takes time – for the first time, I (Wan) planned to focus on art rather than code, and unexpectedly I ended quite happy with the results, given my average drawing skills. The hard part instead was that I’m not used to spend that much time squeezing out assets, and for a rushed coder like me it certainly was a good lesson in patience.
• Review your technical bottlenecks *before* the jam – Every other LD we end up making a platformer, and every. single. time. We spend ages on issues with collisions management and the integration of TilEd (our map editor). The main reason, in the end, is just that we’re not very experienced with physics engines, and it shows: a large part of our time & energy was spent on it, instead of happier things such as level design.
• Spend more time on level design – Of the total 5.5h logged as “Level design”, maybe 3h max was spent on the final levels. It’s still more than our previous entries, but we do seem to procrastinate that task… Too bad because that’s where you get to show that cool gameplay mechanic, and overall, for a platformer, good or bad level design make or break the fun of a game (emphasized for future me :P).
• With good hardware, audio is easy – It’s a more advanced lesson targeted at musicians, but I just discovered how important a good audio interface is. I bought one right before the jam, and not only I was finally able to record noise-free voices, but also the overall mixing and sound-picking for the music felt much easier. The game features no less than 6 – short – music pieces, yet I managed to wrap up satisfying tracks in less than 4 hours.

“How to make art as a s***ty artist”. The making of Squ’s assets probably deserves its own post :P

Overall we still made a great deal of progress in time management since our last entry together, learnt a lot of things and had a huge amount of fun as usual. Thanks for reading! Now go play and rate our game 😉

Hi! We’re a team of two from France, and we’re in for a… hey sixth Ludum Dare already! It’s still as much fun as the first times, if not more.

Techs

• Engine: PhaserJS (with a custom game template built from previous entries, feel free to reuse code)
• Music: Propellerhead Reason 8, Audacity
• Graphics: Photoshop
• Editor: Notepad++
• Other optional stuff, depending on the game: JXFR, TilEd…

Previous entries made together

Minotaur (Platformer) LD32 – #61 Innov., #131 Overall

Corponnected (Management Sim) LD30 – #12 Fun, #14 Overall

Sisyphus (Buggy platformer) LD25 – #46 Overall, #48 Fun

Have fun everyone!