🔞 Adults only, please!  Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

It's that time of year again!  Bees are buzzing, flowers are blooming—  wait, no they aren't, it's the middle of the fucking winter!  But Valentine's Day is upon us, so it's a good a time as any.

Let's make some horny games!

As always, you have all of February to make a horny game, and then two weeks to vote on everyone else's horny games.  If you're rated the best in a category, congratulations!  That's pretty cool.

What constitutes a "horny game" is entirely up to you — plenty of previous submissions (and winners!) have had no sex at all, though plenty have been very explicit as well.  I'm happy as long as we push the boundary of what "horny game" brings to mind!  Go deep, go broad, go abstract, go way off into left field!

If you need some inspiration, check out the previous jams: Strawberry Jam, Strawberry Jam 2, and Strawberry Jam 3; plus a collection of every game that placed top three in any category in any jam!

Feel free to mingle in the jam community or on Discord, where you can share your progress or ask for advice from experts.  Advice on games, I mean; not horny.  But maybe they're also experts on horny?  I guess you could ask!

I'll probably be tweeting about the jam on my Twitter, @eevee, and possibly also on my smut-laden alt, @squishfox.

“Rules”

• There is judging, but nobody wins anything, so don't take it too seriously.  (Please do make an effort to rate and comment on others' games after the jam ends, though!)
• Work alone, in a team, or whatever!  I don't care!
• New games are encouraged, but not required!  However, if you're continuing work on a game in progress, PLEASE leave a comment on your own jam submission page letting everyone know what your starting point was, so we can try to judge only the new stuff.
• 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.  Folks can't enjoy (or rate) your game if they can't play it!
• That said, you don't have to make a video game at all; anything even remotely interactive is fine!  Make a horny board game, horny card game, or horny chore wheel.
• I'm not going to draw any hard lines, but I strongly encourage positivity in your horny — try to stay away from blatant objectification and the like.  (Unless you're into being turned into a coffee table or whatever, that's fine.)  I find it makes the work more accessible, even to folks who don't share the same proclivities.
• Finally, the most important rule: don't get me (or itch) in trouble.  In particular, you MUST mark your game as NSFW if appropriate — it's on the "metadata" tab when uploading or editing a game.  We're all adults here, so I leave the rest to your impeccable judgement.

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.

(If you have collaborators, you can add them by editing the game, clicking More > Admins at the top, adding them as an admin, and clicking the checkbox to show them as a collaborator.  This also lets them list the game on their own Itch profile.)

Please reserve some time to play the other entries, vote on them, and let the authors know what you think!  You know, constructively.

The voting categories are as arbitrary as everything else, but I have included some sample interpretations.

• Play — Did you meaningfully interact with it?  Is it in any way affected by your presence or input?
• Aesthetic — Does it fill your eyeballs with bliss?  Would you frame it and hang it on the back of your bedroom door?
• Sound — Did it caress your eardrums with the most delicate waves?  Is it like ASMR for your junk?
• Narrative — Do events proceed in some recognizable order?  
• Horny — Do you suspect horny was involved in its creation?  Could it function as a vehicle by which horny might be conveyed to others?
• Kink — Did it focus on something totally weird that you didn't think you were into but now kind of see the appeal of but just a little bit?
• Stealth — Is there subtlety at play?  Could you put this in a Spongebob episode without raising any eyebrows?
• Harmony — Does the interaction style mesh well with the horny, and vice versa?  Is it more thoughtful than Bejeweled with a naked girl in the background?
• Novelty — Is something about it surprising and unexpected, and now you're lowkey mad you didn't do it in your own game?

Help!  I am horny but have never made a game

No problem!  You've already got the most important part: motivation.  And the jam lasts a whole month, which should be plenty of time to dip your toes into something new!

You can ask for help (or teammates!) on Discord, and/or try one of the following game making gizmos, which all ⓐ work on any computer, ⓑ don't require programming experience, ⓒ don't focus too much on custom artwork, ⓓ are well-known enough that you can easily get help with them, and ⓔ produce things that can be played online.

bitsy is a teeny tiny game editor for making little stories with a very-low-res pixel art aesthetic.  It's best at exploration and conversation.  No programming required.  Actually, programming it is nearly impossible, so there's a challenge if you want one.

Twine makes choose-your-own-adventures with simple links between pages, and often has no artwork at all — though you can certainly add some, and do all manner of other shenanigans if you're dedicated enough.  It's ultimately just HTML.  Heck, you could skip Twine altogether and make a story out of separate HTML documents.

Inform 7 is an English-like programming language for making those old-school text adventures where you GO NORTH and GO SOUTH and then give up and buy the hint manual.  It is programming, but the code reads like English text, and making a small world with some simple interactions is shockingly straightforward.  The documentation is written in a friendly narrative style that assumes no programming experience whatsoever.

If you're an artist and have a very strong aversion to computers (rightfully so), you could try Flick, a sort of art-based simple alternative to Twine where the player makes choices by clicking on particular colors in an image.

If you're a programmer and have just never tried making a game, you could try LÖVE (an unopinionated 2D Lua engine that I like a lot), the PICO-8 (a retro-styled "fantasy console" with built-in tools for making art, sounds, music, and levels...  but you're on your own with physics), Godot (an integrated Unity-style editor, totally open source), or of course Unity which I hear is popular in some obscure circles.  The Discord has folks with experience with all of these and probably some suggestions for more.

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: Pick a thing that's horny to you — uniquely to you, if possible! — and make a game about it!  Think about the types of games and game mechanics you like, and how they might blend well with the stuff you're into.  You can always look at previous years' entries and shamelessly rip them off — after all, part of the point of this jam is to fill the world with more kinds of horny games!

Q: Can I start early?
A: It is not within my powers to stop you.  But as mentioned above: please leave a comment on the jam submission letting us know what your progress was when the jam started, so we can maintain a thin façade of fairness.

Q: Why is the jam image a picture of a rabbit and a pink blob?  What's horny about that?
A: I think you might be lost.