🔞 Adults only, please!  Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

I've written five of these hook paragraphs over the years and am running out of clever ideas, so let me just get to the point:

Let's make some horny games!

You have all of February to make a horny game, and then two weeks to rate your fellow devs' horny games.  Ratings are spread across a variety of categories, which means 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!  Previous years have seen entries (even winners!) with explicit illustrations, gentle hints at an esoteric interest, or nothing concretely resembling sex at all!  My secret goal for the jam has always been to expand the notion of what "horny game" can mean, so I encourage you to broaden my horizons!  Find something that tickles your fancy and share it creatively and shamelessly with the world!

If you need some inspiration, check out the previous jams: Strawberry Jam, Strawberry Jam 2, Strawberry Jam 3, Strawberry Jam 4, and Strawberry Jam 5.  I also maintain this collection of every game that's 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 OK!  You'll just have to share the glory!
• New games are encouraged, but not strictly required.  If you're continuing work on a game in progress, PLEASE fill in the "early work" field when submitting to the jam, so we can try to judge you only on 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 collectible card game, horny pop-up book, or horny gym equipment.
• The Strawberry Jam culture has always leaned pretty strongly towards positivity when it comes to sexuality, and I encourage following in this grand tradition!  In my experience, presenting sexuality in an enjoyable way makes it much more accessible even to folks who don't share your same interests!
• 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 single words that you are free to interpret as you please, but I have included some examples.

• Play — Do you feel like your presence affected the experience?  Did your input have any impact?
• Aesthetic — Does gazing upon this artifact release endorphins?  Do you prefer looking at it to not looking at it?
• Sound — Does it make noise?  Would you describe the noise as "good"?
• Narrative — Within the internal universe of this item, do any identifiable events occur in causal sequence?
• Horny — Does this get you twitterpating, or do you suspect it would generally have that effect on others?
• Kink — Is there a curiously strong focus on an activity you suspect the creator has gotten a lot of commissions of?
• Stealth — Would you show this to your coworkers, assuming you don't have, like, incredibly chill coworkers?
• Harmony — Do the various parts, especially the horny parts, mesh together smoothly?  Or is this a Tetris clone that shows you a naked lady every ten levels?
• Novelty — Is this unlike any horny game you have seen before?  Has it expanded the genre beyond what you even thought possible?

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.  They're all a bit quirky and not quite suited for making e.g. an FPS, but that's probably not why you're here anyway!

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 are a programmer (especially if you're also an artist, or have an artist friend on call) 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 six 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 heavily frowned upon.  If you absolutely must, 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: Why are the start and end times slightly odd?
A: Because here, it's mountin' time!  Haha!  No but really I'm in Colorado, in the US's forgotten timezone.

Q: Why is there rabbit and fox
A: I am not entirely sure this is the right jam for you!