🔞 Adults only, please!  Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

It's February!  Valentine's Day is coming up, sandwiched firmly betwixt two fortnights.  Love is in the air, and "love" is really a euphemism for pheromones.

So let's make some horny games!

Again!

Strawberry Jam was a fantastic success, and the deal is the same this year.  You have one month (all of February) to make a horny game, and then two weeks to vote on everyone else's horny games.  The winners get nothing!  It's very exciting.

There is a Discord, where you can share your progress or ask for advice from experts!  On games, I mean, not horny.  Maybe they're also experts on horny?  I don't know.

Note that while my main Twitter is @eevee, I try to keep it not-too-explicit, so I'm more likely to tweet about the jam on my porn-slathered smutty alt, @squishfox.

Rules

This jam is judged, but there are no prizes, so don't take it too seriously.  That said, new games are strongly preferred — feel free to finish up something on the backburner, but please don't enter existing games (or minor reskins thereof).  Cheaters will be spanked.  Unpleasantly.

Your game should be horny!  Defining "horny" is left as an exercise to the reader.  Last year, the interpretations ran the gamut: distance is so abstract it's kid-friendly; Swallow Squad is obviously themed around a kink but has no sexual content at all; and Mr. Wanky largely centers around a photo of an erection.  Be creative!  Be personal!  Be weird!  Be vulnerable!  Have fun!

If at all possible, please try to release for all three major platforms — Linux, Mac, and that other one.  Or both Android and iOS.  Something that runs in a browser is great too.  (That said, you don't have to make a video game; you could just as well design a card game or a board game!)

Finally, don't get me in trouble!  If you have to ask whether a thing you do could get me in trouble, probably just don't do it.

Voting

Voting lasts for two weeks after the end of the jam, i.e. the first half of March.  Anyone who submits a game or contributes to a submitted game can vote.  Please take some time to play the other entries, vote on them, and let the authors know what you think!  It's no fun making a game that no one plays.

The voting categories are entirely arbitrary and wide open to interpretation.  The winner of each category shall receive an exclusive prize of absolutely nothing.  Categories are as follows:

• Game — Does this remind you of game?  Does it respond to stimuli?  Do you enjoy those responses?
• Looks — Is this pleasant for your eyeballs?  Is it a veritable ocular treat?
• Sounds — Does this make noise?  Is the noise good?  Would you be willing to hear more of the noise?  Please give your answer in the form of a number.
• Narrative — Is there a plot?  Do events occur in a meaningful interrelated sequence?  Does anything really matter, or are we all just space dust?
• Horny — Is this horny?  Do you suspect the parties responsible for its creation were, themselves, horny?  Have they infused you with their horny?
• Kink — Is there something here that the author is 100% definitely into and now you can never look at their cute avatar of a plush kangaroo the same way again?
• Stealth — Is this undercover horny?  Could you play this on the subway without eliciting shocked gasps?  (Empirical verification is not necessary and is, in fact, outright discouraged.)
• Harmony — Do the "game" parts meld elegantly with the "horny" parts?  Is the result an awkward shambling mess of a chimera, or a totally hot chimera?
• Novelty — Is this something you would not have expected in a horny game jam?  Has it forced you to challenge your most fundamental assumptions about the vast potential hidden within the marriage of horny with games?

I am horny but cannot video games??

Don't be preposterous!  With the Internet, it's very easy to horny, and it's almost as easy to video games.  And you've got a whole month to give it a try!

You can ask around on Discord, or try one of the following game making whatsits, which I have carefully chosen to ⓐ work on any computer, ⓑ not require any previous programming experience, ⓒ not focus too much on custom artwork, and ⓓ probably have at least a few fans on Discord who could help you out.

bitsy is a very very tiny game editor that "makes it easy to make games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere".  It's a delightful way to tell tiny stories with a little pixel art aesthetic.  I made Roguelike Simulator in only a day with bitsy!

Twine is great for writing choose-your-own-adventure stories, which are very easy to make horny!  Plus, with some very minor witchcraft and the Harlowe 2 story format, you can generate text on the fly or track the player's status or all kinds of other things.  And since it's all text, there's no art required — though you certainly can add art or sound.

Inform 7 is a system for writing very old-school text adventures where you type out everything you want to do, like GET YE FLASK or TAKE PANTIES.  You could use this to write a game about, say, taking panties.  Or flasks?  It's very powerful, but it's also pretty easy to dip your toes into, and you could make a small world with a fair amount of depth without much trouble.

MegaZeux is an ancient 2D game engine with a built-in editor and a very DOS aesthetic.  It has a bunch of little puzzle elements built in, so you can experiment with it like it were just a level editor — but it also has a little programming language for custom objects, and making a world full of horny NPCs is pretty easy.  (That said, the interface is a little obtuse, so feel free to ask for help if you want to give it a try.)

ZDoom is a modern continuation of the classic Doom engine.  I've written before about how to make levels, but ZDoom supports extensive modding of the basic gameplay as well.  I'd be very impressed if you made something horny with this — but it's not unheard of!

If you do have programming experience and want to dive right in, you could try LÖVE (an unopinionated 2D Lua engine that I've used for all my platformers), the PICO-8 (a retro-styled "fantasy console" with built-in tools for making pixel art, maps, and chiptunes), or of course Unity which I hear is moderately popular.

If you're an artist but wish to avoid anything that even remotely resembles programming, you could try Flick, a sort of art-based equivalent to Twine where the player makes choices by clicking on particular colors in an image.

Other lists of possible game-making tools for beginners:

• itch's own list of game dev tools for Ludum Dare
• sortingh.at for interactive advice
• kool.tools
• a list of tools for making narrative games

FAQ

Q: I don't know what kind of game to make!
A: What do you think is horny?  Make a game about that!  Try blending it with gameplay mechanics you enjoy in an interesting way.  Maybe look through last year's entries for inspiration — part of the trouble is that there's not too much prior art for horny games, which this jam is intended to fix!  If all else fails, make a Tetris clone where the blocks are made of boobs.

Q: Wait, can I really—
A: I…  I guess…

Q: Can I start early?
A: That's cheating, so yes, but only if you think cheating is horny.

Q: Why is Cerise the mascot when she's themed around cherries, not strawberries?
A: That's an excellent question!