The 5th Kajam is over, the long awaited results are in, and sadly I must graciously accept the honour of last place. It may not be your first impression to think of it as an honour, but just as every cloud has a silver lining even last place is itself a prize dependant on how you look at it.
By coming in last I therefore made the most mistakes, and by making the most mistakes I then have the most to learn and gain from taking part in this Kajam. I'm going to attempt to reflect on my own submission and work out what I could have done better. If you have any further constructive feedback I'd love to hear it.

I would like to quickly take this opportunity to thank every single person who played, rated and provided feedback on Street Bots. I appreciate every one of you.

Issue 1 - Inspiration: I chose to make a retro game inspired by Pokémon, a high standard to set the bar by. I did so because I love Pokémon and I've never made an adventure rpg so I wanted to challenge myself. An important step I missed was to look at what gave Pokémon its spark, why people loved the games and what drew them in. I think a big part of Pokémon is the depth of the world; the spreading map that you gradually explore, the chance to encounter new creatues in each place, growing your team and forming an attachment to them over time as they help you overcome various challenges. I dont think a lot of these features translate well to a smaller, shorter game which is of course what I would be making when taking part in a timed event (and starting 3 weeks late!).

Issue 2 - Flare (or lack thereof): Not being an artist this is probably something I am often guilty of. A game doesnt have to be flashy to be good but the lifeless, unanimated battles of Street Bots certainly didnt add to the immersion. The battles lacked both SFX and animation and I think this detracted from the "fall in love factor" which can draw people into games. Another example would be the player movement. I struggled at first to get the movement to feel how I wanted and decided to opt for the "good enough" approach and move on. This was a mistake because movement was such a huge part of the game. The first thing you do is move, the majority of time playing the game is probably spent moving around. I tested the game many many times and got used to the clunky movement, however to someone just downloading and trying the game the awkwardness would detract heavily from the rest of the experience.

Issue 3 - Scope: The game was just too much for me to handle in only just over a week. Add in that I got suddenly sick and didn't do any dev for 2 or 3 days and there's just not enough time. If I'd had the time I would've added a lot more to some of the existing mechanics; multiple bot battles using teams, some sort of effectiveness system in battles,  a mechanic similar to wild Pokémon for training your bots and full keyboard controls! No more cheap UI and mouse elements. Some of these features could've added more variety and life to the game. In it's current state it feels linear and stale.

Despite the bad things I've said about it I'm very proud of Street Bots. I love the game and learned a lot from creating it.
If you've actually read this entire post then thank you for reading my internal monologue brain dump. I hope you too can learn something from it.
Another huge thanks to everyone who played Street Bots, everyone who took part in Kajam 5 and the fantastic organisers of Alakajam. I look forward to the next one!

Wildfire is a game that you probably didn't play for the 5th Kajam, mainly because I completely failed to get it done in time.

The main reason for that was that I was busy working on a killer feature that I wanted to have available before people played (and forgot about) the game.

The new feature I've added to the game is the ability to create levels. This is pretty cool (IMHO) because it's adding "cloud saves" to a PICO-8 game. The way it's done is by exploiting the GPIO flags that were added to PICO-8 presumably to be able to control simple lights on your Raspberry Pi or similar. Since the data needed to store a level is pretty light, I save it in these GPIO controls, which can then be read by the HTML5 app serving the PICO-8 cart. The data is then stored on my own server via a REST interface.

This means that any level you create is available to play for all players via the "challenges" list! I can't wait to see what kind of crazy challenges will appear!

Have a play here: Wildfire

The jam is over

You all did an awesome job! Thanks to all the great devs who took part in this jam, by creating a 'retro' game during August 2018 and especially by playing and rating other games. Telling the creators of a game what you feel, like (and perhaps dislike) on a game is super valuable and will create a huge amount of motivation! We are especially happy that we have a new submission highscore for a Kajam.

Of course we have some shiny medals to show! The games were rated on a single 'retro' score. While createing a game on its own is an awesome achievement and everyone can be super proud of the games, some were worth mentioning far beyond the other games. So without further adue:

Here are the results

Long live the jam

Of course we all get a sort of past-jam-blues after such an awesome event. But fear not! We have some awesome events prepared for you:

2nd Alakajam Tournament September 8 - 23 2018

During the tournamet you can compete in games created for the 3rd Alakajam or the 5th Kajam via our highscore system, either for the fastest speedrun or the highest score.

4th Alakajam October 12 - 14 2018

The next regular Alakajam will take place in October 12-14. This is a big, weekend-long event for you to take part in!

6th Kajam November 2018

The next month-long event will be run in November by @DaFluffyPotato . If you enjoyed doing this Kajam, save the date and clear your calendar as it will be equally awesome!

Congratulations to everyone!

During the month of August you managed to create a game! But we have another reason to celebrate: This is the Kajam with the most entries! Keep up the spirit and spread the word!

Voting

During the next week (from 3. September to 9. September) you will have the chance to play and rate all the awesome games, which have been created for this Kajam. There is only one voting category, called "retro". And of course you can give comment on everybody's game and give them a lot of valuable feedback!

"Help, I am late!"

Don't worry! Submissions will stay open until the end of the jam (until Sunday, 9. September). However, it is recommended to submit as soon as possible. This will give other jammers time to give feedback and also give you the time to comment and rate the other entries.

My plans for August were to make a game for Ludum Dare 42 that could also fit this month's Kajam. When the LD came up with the theme "Running out of space", I quickly got the idea of a terminal game where the goal was to free space. I also felt slightly lazy at that time, and not too excited by the idea of writing a fake file system with commands for it, for some reason. When @Aurel300 offered me to join his LD entry as a composer, I was quite quick to accept, and immediately trashed my game idea x)

Fast forward to this morning - after a few days, the scrapped idea had time to grow on me a bit, and I felt I could still explore it for the Kajam. Making working terminal commands was more fun and less work than I expected! After 2 or 3 hours I could eventually add the game contents, and take some time to polish various corner cases (I was sure some players would try obscure things to see what they would do, so I didn't want to disappoint :P)

The end result took about 4 hours to make, it is short but hopefully fun. Let me know what you think!

I've been pottering on an entry over the last two weeks, wasn't sure if I would finish it, but I think I will! A short adventure game in a row boat …

pixel art platformer in pico-8 hopefully that ticks enough retro boxes

So far going pretty ok for a first time in pico-8, and its easy to export gifs too :D

They do say better late than never!

I wasn't planning on entering this Kajam but I've had a sudden change of heart and an idea.
Hopefully I can get something together in time that's decent enough to get people's interest.

All I have so far is a simple character but it's good to get the ball rolling.

Good luck to everyone else taking part and especially to those latecomers in the same situation as me!

I love retro games, so I'm totally joining.

I'm going to make a text adventure. I might add some RPG elements too, who knows. Hopefully I can get it done by the 31st.

With my holiday coinciding with Kajam 5, And the theme matching perfectly with what i would love to make. i wish that i owned a laptop. So i find myself writing a text adventure on my phone and with a story idea and a plan to send it to my self once i get home i have all the parts of my entry setout. I just need to write a convincing story and make a large branching path story which can be a winner.

Good luck to all other entrants in the competition, i wish you all good luck.