🔞 Adults only, please! Sexual content ahoy. 🔞

Wow!  It's February.

Let's make some horny games!

Strawberry Jam is a low-pressure jam about horny games!  You have all of February to make a game, and then everyone has the first two weeks of March to play and rate each other's games.  Ratings come in a bunch of categories, which gives everyone more chances to win!  If that sounds intimidating, worry not — winning doesn't really matter, because there are no prizes!

And because it's a leap year, you have an ENTIRE EXTRA DAY!  Wahoo!

Be sure to check out the jam community forum whatsit and Discord, where you can share your progress, ask for help/teammates, or apologize profusely for definitely not being able to finish on time (an ancient and hallowed Strawberry Jam tradition).

"Theme"

Fuck themes!  Strawberry Jam is at its best if you make something no one has made before.  Show us your weird kink you don't think anyone else has, in video game form.  Make an Ikaruga but they're naked and that matters somehow.  Hell, just write a visual novel to introduce us to your OCs who all like to kiss each other.  Make something new, something distinct, something personal — something that greases your gears.  You even get an audience of other sex-positive folks to try your game out!

For a more concrete idea of how un-concrete the theming is, I maintain a collection of every game that's ever placed top 3 in any category, including:

• Unspecified Behavior, one of a series of little RPG-style story games about maybe being a drone would be nice maybe
• Prove You Are Not A Human, which challenges you to perform tedious rote tasks without getting distracted to prove you are a robot
• Sex Advice Succubus, a visual novel that talks about sex without actually doing any
• Dragon Diving, a cute little vore-flavored game that you could play on a real Game Boy if you are the sort of person to have the requisite hardware on hand to do that (which I am)
• Ody Mos, a game that is just about the pure experience of putting dicks in butts, except it's controlled entirely via inverse kinematics on your hands and feet good luck

This isn't to say that you must push the bounds of what is conceptually horny and/or a game!  It's to emphasize that if you do have an idea that feels kind of out there, you should absolutely run with it.  If you want to just make some smut, that's fine too!  I've done it myself, more than once.  Just remember: the best smut is still personal!

Rules

Entries are judged!  But not, like, harshly.  The point of the judging isn't to compete, really — it's mostly to get everyone to play each other's games, and hopefully comment and compliment on what went well.  Also it's always really interesting to see what came in last in like, Stealth.

Only what you did in February counts!  Not that the judging is super serious, but most entries are new games made in four weeks.  If you're finishing up something you'd already started, please let us know — there's an "i started early" field when submitting to the jam — so you're not putting up a year's effort against four weekends.

Bugfixing during judging is OK.  Especially if it's a bug that prevents people from playing your game.  But please hold off on major updates until judging is over, so we all see generally the same game.

Teams are okay too!  Just remember to add all your teammates as collaborators, so they can vote too.  (Edit your game, click More → Admins in the top bar, and send them admin invites.  They'll have to accept, too!)  And bear in mind you'll have to split the prize — which is, again, nothing.

Any kind of game is okay!  It doesn't even have to be a video game — if it involves any kind of interaction whatsoever, that's fine.  Someone once submitted an interactive DVD and it was fantastic.

Mark your game as NSFW!  If it is so, anyway.  This lets people filter NSFW games out when browsing itch, if they so choose.  (Or filter to only NSFW games.)  There's a checkbox for this on the Metadata tab when you upload or edit a game.  Also if you haven't opted into seeing NSFW games in your user settings you might want to do that.

Be accessible!  People can't judge it if they can't play it!  Even a Windows-only game might exclude a few potential judges.  Cross-platform is good; a Web version is ideal.  Also please prefer ZIP over RAR.  And when you upload files, check the appropriate boxes for which platform(s) they run on!

Be positive!  Out there in the wild, folks tend to look for horny games that play to their specific interests.  But here, your audience is a bunch of randos who may or may not be into your thing, and may not be used to overlooking unfortunate implications of your thing.  You can still make it work — you've just gotta be self-aware.

Voting

Voting lasts for two weeks after the end of the jam, i.e. the first half of March.  Everyone who submitted a game, or collaborated on a submitted game, can vote.

(Again, if you worked in a group, then whoever uploads the game can add the rest of the group on the "edit game" page — click More > Admins at the top, invite them to be admins, and click the checkbox to show them as collaborators.  They'll get an email with a link to accept.  They'll also be able to list the game on their own Itch pages, which is nice.)

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

The voting categories are deliberately given as single words, to encourage personal interpretation, but they are roughly:

• Play — Are you engaged?  Do you experience engagement?  Does it at least, like, work?
• Aesthetic — Is it a delight to the eyeballs?  Did they at least change the default Twine skin?
• Sound — Is it a delight to the eardrums?  Did they ask fluffy to make music for them?
• Narrative — Do events occur in sequence and impact one another, reflecting the causal nature of time?
• Horny — Is it horny?  To you?  To its creators?  To anyone, somewhere, probably?
• Kink — Does it transcend the typical bounds of what is typically understood as sex?
• Stealth — Could you get away with playing this at work?  Or if you work in porn, at someone else's work?
• Harmony — Do the "horny" and "game" parts mesh inextricably?
• Novelty — Is it unlike anything you've seen before or will ever see again, until Fortnite adds it as a mode?
• Ambition — Is it just plain fucking unbelievable that someone did this in a month, or tried to do this at all?

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

Well I'm horny but making games is impossible probably

Sounds like you're motivated, which means you're halfway there already!  You've got a whole month, so don't be scared to try making a prototype!  Your first game won't be a Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom™, but you'll be able to press buttons and have things happen on the screen that you decided, and that feels fucking magical.

If you're completely new to this scene, perhaps try one of these game-making thingamajigs, 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 limit what you can do, but, that's good actually.

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 different sort of 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 webpages.

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.  No one has ever taken me up on this suggestion but one year I'm sure it will happen.

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.  Or you could ask around for a programmer who needs an artist because I guarantee you there will be at least a couple.

If you are already 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) or the TIC-80 (a similar idea, but open source, free, and somewhat lesser-known despite being pretty solid), 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
• the tiny tools directory, or everestpipkin's tools list which it was based on
• a list of tools for making narrative games

Keep in mind that I've been copy-pasting this list across jam pages for like eight 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!   Try stuff out!  That's what Strawberry Jam is about!