A special note about this event! 7 5

Thanks Wan and everyone else who handled the site, organisation and other less glamorous aspects of AKJ. It's sad to see the jam come to a close but better than letting it fade away as organisers have less time and interest.

❤️

Hope to see the Jam come back some day but it's fair enough that life happens and people get busy =)

Oh man! Well thank you for making the site, keeping it alive and hosting this cool little game jam!

Firstly I want to thank Wan for creating Alakajam, and thank all of those who've helped to run the site all of these years.

While I haven't participated in many events due to my own declining interest (and skill) in gamejamming over the past decade, I do sit and watch from the sidelines. I like that Alakajam exists, and I think I will miss it if/when it's over.

I suspect the slowdown in participation over the years has played a role on admin interest. When you're hosting a jam for hundreds of people, that makes your admininstrative efforts feel both rewarding and meaningful. You feel like you're doing something important, and you feel valued. But when there are only a handful of entries being submitted per event, it's understandable that the reward-to-effort ratio will (for many) dip below the threshold where you stay interested. More chore than privilege.

And I suspect a similar phenomenon is true for participants too: when so few eyes get to see your game that you spent all weekend slaving over, you might begin to question whether it was worth all the effort.

Each of these may well feed a vicious circle of declining interest for the other: hosting and participation.

That said, for some years now it has felt to me like there is a lot of work and build up for the few jammers who do take part (build up = the announcements and whole theme selection process). It makes sense with a bigger event like ludum dare, but this 'democratic process' (suggestions, theme voting, rating, etc) doesn't make as much sense with such small numbers i think - it just makes the event feel drawn out, long winded, and maybe even too bureaucratic, for an online world that has become increasingly fast paced, even spontaneous. Even ludum dare didn't mechanise the theme selection in it's early days when there were under 100 participants, someone would just pick a theme from an internal list.

But looking ahead to the future: There is this old saying that things must adapt or die. The world changes: people's lives, internet norms, and our interests all drift over time. We grow weary when things have become routine for the sake of routine. And I suspect that alakajam has become such a routine for many.

So what could the future hold? Can Alakajam be reborn from it's own ashes, into a new gamejam phoenix?

I think we should first remember that Alakajam was conceived as an alternative to ludum dare, during ludum dare's rough patch. It positioned itself as a clone of sorts: a cultural follower rather than a cultural leader. I've always felt that it was constrained by that choice. Perhaps now is an opportunity for Alakajam to fully break free from that constraint, and become a pioneer, to carve out it's own path?

I'd be happy if Alakajam could transition into something new, perhaps more curated or more spontaneous. While I don't have an exact formula in mind, I could see a future for a gamejam website that's more personal and less procedural than it is at present.

Hello everyone. I am new to game dev and I wanted to try something new. Unfortunately I thought this could be a learning experience and I tried implimenting features that I didn't understand. I also no long have enough time to learn and create. If anyone has any tips on where to start learning pygame please let me know, thanks.

This is gonna be the most bittersweet jam.
While my time is limited, I'll try to do my best.

@LeCubin_ Some of our members use Pygame so if you need specific tips you can try to ask over on our Discord server, or even directly Pygame-specific Discords like Fluffland. Best wishes for your game, and don't worry if you have troubles making it work in time: many jammers need a few attempts to get there!

@all Thanks to all for the support, your messages are appreciated! Quite a bittersweet moment indeed, but it feels better to take action now than just let things silently decay. And like @sorceress, I also think this could be an opportunity for Alakajam to eventually become something different. There's many ideas that have been discussed actually, some of them being around for years, the biggest issue being more about finding the resources and interest to make them happen. Hopefully this break will leave enough breathing room for people to make things happen.

@sorceress Some more thoughts to respond to yours: I've never felt that the jam format was too convoluted, to me the hype building has always been part of the charm for these events so I'm not sure that has been a real issue. But yeah for the admin team it would have been much more comfortable (and less error-prone!) if events we more fully automated like they are on 1HGJ. I actually tried to implement that back in… *checks Git history*… 2018/2019, but never finished the thing unfortunately!

Also I agree that Alakajam has partially remained "a smaller Ludum Dare" overall, although the people who came here also came for "an alternative to Ludum Dare with a bigger sense of community", which I think we partially achieved, at least in the first few years of the site. Although it's true that many of us had the secret hope we'd become the LibreOffice of jam sites, being a more human-sized jam where you know 50% of the people has its charm. I'm sure that's part of what made LD's pre-Notch days special. Looking back, I'd say what hasn't helped us was mostly:

1. Being late to the party, with the whole jam ecosystem already shifting circa 2017 towards existing communities like YouTubers/Streamers, techs etc. organizing their own jams (thanks to itch.io and the likes making it so easy, which is great), rather than communities forming around just the idea of game jams ;
2. This may be a side effect of 1., but our team not being able to renew itself enough in the long run to keep an active core going, and in particular us not keeping enough people with a genuine interest in community management & event planning. LD stays afloat for historical reasons but like non-profits, open source projects or even paper RPG campaigns, keeping most communities healthy need work. As a teen I had more success on that front with another website, which I think mostly boiled down to being 2 founders that complemented each other: me as the website developer, and a friend who played more of a "project lead" role, running the team, producing content, and taking strategic initiatives with the site's overall direction. Alakajam has been for me a coding project first and foremost, and since I'm not very good at maintaining a social presence in general it's been a bit difficult to be on those fronts as well. Turning Alakajam into a non-profit for a few years was an attempt at empowering the team, but without people with a strong interest in taking a strategic role there's no magic recipe. (EDIT: I hope this does not sound too negative, as we did manage to have many different people hosting events, and people like Laaph, Aurea, Toasty, Laguna, Dollarone etc. have all done a great work running things over the years)

Regarding differenciation, Alakajam has had its main - failed - attempt in the form of "more incentives to play the games we make", with the tournaments that let us compete on jam entries. The concept really speaked to me as I had fond memories of sites featuring competitive flash mini-games, and I really believed that it could be a killer feature for AKJ. Turns out it's quite a niche interest! Or maybe I was just bad at promoting the idea of it?

I think the most success we've had in making Alakajam be its own thing is with the streams of @Aurel300 and @DanaePlays, which really brought the sense of community alive :)

There's been other, probably fitting evolutions we've considered over the years, but they all required either more community management or more development efforts than I could invest at that point. This whole hiatus thing may be an interesting change though, it did cause me to have some fresh ideas to try and distil the main purposes of sites like ours into something simpler, so who knows maybe you'll see some cool things appear here in a near future.

Ok this turned out a bit long and introspective, and hopefully not too negative, Alakajam is something I'm pretty proud to be a part of so that wouldn't do it justice. Did it feel like a… postmortem of Alakajam? I hope not.