🔞 Adults only, please!  Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

It's almost February!  And with it comes Valentine's Day, our celebration of St. Valentine, the patron saint of...  epilepsy?  That can't be right.  Well, regardless—

Let's make some horny games!

For the fifth time, you have all of February to make a horny game, and then two weeks to vote on everyone else's horny games.  There are lots of categories, so lots of chances to place first!  And if you don't place first, that's okay, because there are no prizes!

What constitutes a "horny game" is entirely up to you!  Despite what you might expect, 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, Strawberry Jam 3, and Strawberry Jam 4.  I also maintain this collection of every entry that has placed top three in any category in any Strawberry Jam!

Feel free to mingle in the jam community or on Discord, where you can share your progress or ask for advice from experts.  Game dev experts, I mean, not horny experts.  Maybe they're also horny experts?  I don't know what that means!

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!)
• Teams are allowed!  In fact, that seems kind of on-brand!
• New games are encouraged, but not required.  However, if you're continuing work on a game in progress, PLEASE fill in the "early work" field when submitting to the jam to let 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 a game that as many people as possible can actually run, or you'll be limiting who can actually play (and rate) your game!
• That said, you don't have to make a video game at all; anything even remotely interactive is fine!  Make a horny tabletop game, horny sport, or horny game show.
• I'm not going to draw any hard lines, but I strongly encourage positivity in your horny — you don't know your audience here, and you might bum some of them out with blatant objectification and the like.  (Unless you're into being turned into a tea kettle 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 collaborated on 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 — How would you rate this artifact on a scale from "interactive" to "catatonic"?
• Aesthetic — Is it a delight for your eyeballs?  Would you use this in place of kitten photos to cleanse some Internet horror from your vision?
• Sound — Will you awkwardly fumble to explain to your coworkers what you didn't realize you were humming?
• Narrative — Is this item bound by the rules of mortal causality?  Do things occur, making way for other things to occur?
• Horny — Do you suspect the author is totally into this, and is offering this work up to others who are also totally into this?
• Kink — Did you learn something new about yourself that is, in a word, unconventional?
• Stealth — Is this socially acceptable to a degree you never thought possible in a game jam with this theme?
• Harmony — Do the various categories gel with each other, or is it more like a Left 4 Dead 2 mod that inexplicably changes the flashlight texture to a naked Gardevoir?
• Novelty — Has this broadened your understanding of what is possible in the medium of video games, let alone video games, and you're definitely gonna rip that off in your next game?

Help!  I am horny but have never made a game

Great news!  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 in a browser.

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 (rightly 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 some people like I guess.  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
• everestpipkin's tools list
• a list of tools for making narrative games
  

Keep in mind that I've been copy-pasting this list across jam pages for like five years now, so there might be newfangled things I haven't even heard of!  Ask around, search itch for tools, see what you can find!

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: Since this is a ranked jam, it is slightly frowned upon, but not forbidden.  But as mentioned above: please fill in the jam submission field with what your progress was when the jam started, so we can maintain a thin façade of fairness.

Q: Nice butt.
A: That's not a question but thanks!  Can't believe so many of you said this that I had to add it to the FAQ.