🔞 Adults only, please! Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

Feels like only yesteryear, but somehow, it's February again...

Let's make some horny games!

Strawberry Jam is a low-pressure jam about expanding the world of horny games!  You have all of February to make something, and then we all play each other's games for the first half of March.  We also rate each other's games, but that's mostly a carrot to encourage playing them, because the winners get nothing!

Some helpful upfront links:

• The jam community itch forum thingamajig — Share progress, look for teammates, or perform the ancient and hallowed Strawberry Jam ritual of apologizing that you won't be able to finish the magnum opus you wanted to make.
• The Strawberry Jam Discord — Basically the same idea but in real time.  Be aware that this is part of my personal Discord and I am protective of the vibes!
• Strawberry Jam finalists — An Itch collection of every game that has placed top 3 in any category in any Strawberry Jam, if you need some inspiration, or just a sense of the culture.

Theme

A couple people ask every year if there's a theme, so, okay, sure, since it happens to be what I drew for the banner: hypnosis!  But there's no bonus for following the theme, and no penalty for ignoring the theme.  It's almost like it's not a theme at all!

Really, you can do whatever you want.  Horny is in the eye of the beholder, so if I can imagine a perspective where it's horny, it belongs here.  We've had reverse CAPTCHAs, an advice hotline, soft-body Tetris, a lab platforming adventure, and an inverse kinematics dick-stuffer.  Some of these don't mention sex at all!  Some of them do, but get real weird with it.  Show us something personal, and unexpected!

It doesn't even have to be a video game!  We've had TTRPGs and physical card games before — though the feedback tends to be somewhat more limited.

Rules

Only what you did in February counts!  The ratings don't matter, but they should still be fair, right?  Ideally, games should be new, but if you really want to dust off something you once started, that's okay — just let us know where you were starting from.  (There's a field when you submit a game.)  Just, you know, use your judgment.  Don't take something that was 95% done and polish it up for this jam.

And if you submit a game on Feb 3 that obviously took more than 3 days of work I will be very upset with you.

If your game is explicit, flag it as NSFW!  This lets Itch filter those games out for people who don't want to see them (...or browse only those games, for people who do want to see them).  There's a checkbox under Metadata when you submit/edit your game.

Be accessible if possible!  If your fellow jammers can't play your game, they definitely can't rate it.  Cross-platform (Linux/Mac/Windows) is good; a Web player is great.  And please prefer ZIP over RAR.  And when you're uploading your game files, be sure you check the boxes for the platforms it runs on, or the Itch app won't be able to play them!

Be thoughtful!  Remember, your game might be played by fellow devs who aren't into Your Thing!  So try not to lean too hard into porn tropes.  Even if the one thing that gets your gears turning is a faceless protagonist with no personality inexplicably attracting a lot of beautiful partners...  why is that happening?  Do the partners realize?  Does anyone have an opinion on this?  Is the effect only temporary?  Be self-aware!  Be vulnerable!

No generative AI!  A computer can never be horny, therefore a computer can never make a creative decision.  I'm not interested in an image that's just statistically likely to match "wolf girl big titty", and I doubt the other participants are either.  No Midjourney, no ChatGPT, no Gemini, no Stable Diffusion, no Bing, no Copilot, no Claude, no Llama.  No.

Ratings

The rating period is the first two weeks of March, up through the end of the 14th.  Everyone who worked on a game can rate other games.  (See the FAQ about teams.)

Please make some time to play the other games!  And leave a thoughtful comment if you can, too!  Sometimes the jam attracts far too many entries for most people to play, but do what you can — and try not to just play the games with the prettiest thumbnails and call it a day, either.  Itch offers a list of the games with the fewest ratings, so try to give some of those a shot, especially if you have limited time.

There are a lot of voting categories, but they're all single words to encourage personal interpretation, so don't think too hard about them.  If you're staring at one for more than ten seconds, you're definitely thinking too hard.

• Play — Are there things to do?  Do other things happen when you do them?
• Aesthetic — Is this nice to look at?  Did you see the font and think "nice font", like some kind of font person?
• Sound — Does your eardrum quiver meaningfully in response to game behavior?
• Narrative — Is causality maintained?  Do events occur, and also influence other events which occur later?
• Horny — Is this horny?  Could this make someone horny?  Was its creator definitely horny about it?
• Kink — Is something funny going on here that there is definitely a name for, even if you don't know what it is?
• Stealth — Could you play this on the bus and no one would think anything of it, even if you explained it to them?
• Harmony — Do the Play part and the Horny part make sense together?  Could this exist without one or the other?
• Novelty — Have you never seen anything like this before?  Do you suddenly know what you're doing for Strawberry Jam 10?
• Ambition — Can you not fucking believe someone even attempted this in a month?  Are they definitely some kind of wizard?

You don't have to try for every category, or try for any category at all!  There's a lot of them because I want to recognize as many kinds of effort as possible.

And please don't ever feel bad about whatever ratings you get!  You still made a thing, and that puts you way ahead of everyone who didn't.

FAQ

What on earth time zone are the deadlines in?
The one I live in — mountin' time  😉

Help!  I don't know how to video game.
Truly, none of us do.  You could try the list of beginner-friendly stuff at the bottom of last year's jam page!  Someday I ought to port that to my real website.

Are teams allowed?
Sure, why not!  But if you win, you'll have to split the prize (nothing).  Also, you should add your teammates as collaborators, so they can rate other games too — edit your game, go to More → Admins, send them admin invites, and make sure they accept.  This will also list the game on their Itch pages, which is nice.

Can I use free assets?
As long as they're the work of sentient life, absolutely!  But let us know when you submit, so we're not giving you too many props for the bits you didn't make yourself.  (Effective use of someone else's art does still take skill, though!)

Can I fix bugs in my game once judging starts?
Yes!  Especially if they're game-breaking!  But do please hold off on major updates until after the judging is done, so everyone gets to play generally the same thing.

Why is my score lower than my "raw score"?
If a game gets "too few" ratings, Itch lowers the scores a bit.  The idea is that if most people didn't play the game at all, that's a sign that something went wrong (like perhaps it just doesn't run).  Unfortunately, this does disadvantage non-traditional games like TTRPGs, which are difficult to play without a group.  I have no control over this, so all the more reason to play as many games as you can, especially the ones that are low on ratings!