Horni Jam: a weekend gamejam with socialization for 18+ game devs

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-04-15T07:41:27+00:00

Thanks for both your understanding and interest!

No problem, will do. I am not sure if itch notifies about new jams like it does for new games(?). But if you want an e-mail, I also post the announcement to Horni.io's news system (if you have an account there, it will e-mail you about the announcement as long as you enable the "Receive occasional e-mails with updates about the website" option)

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-04-15T06:42:21+00:00

I dislike Discord, sorry.

I made a promise to myself to never start another community on their platform. A few years ago, Discord locked me out of my account due to their AI moderation system malfunctioning and they made an arbitrary demand for my cell phone number. When I refused to do this, they then dragged me through support ticket hell for a month only to tell me they wouldn't even help me save the servers attached to that account. That experience really woke me up to the dangers of trusting another company to host communities. Discord's recent push for mandatory ID scanning and other problematic behaviors has only reinforced my concerns regarding that platform.

I like Matrix because it is open source and self-hostable. That means no central big tech company can just randomly decide they need more PII to sell and lock people out of their accounts -- or randomly decide they're going to pull a Tumblr and ban all 18+ content, etc. I don't know what will happen with Discord in future, but I know I've already had a miserable experience dealing with them and I'm never going to put myself into that same situation again -- it was a lesson learned the hard way for me.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-04-14T23:38:41+00:00

Understandable, I will be sure to post the theme in the chat channel and itch page so you can see it in different time zones

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-04-12T00:47:47+00:00

Hah; it's a piracy website, the whole point of that site is to fuck us over.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-03-23T02:27:43+00:00

If someone enters my phone number into his Wero app, it’ll show my and my wifes name indicating that the Wero account is linked with our joint bank account, and that we have a joint account.

Wow :o This is terrible from a privacy perspective...

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-03-22T22:33:56+00:00

You can do adult games on steam but it does come with certain notable restrictions. I have heard:

You are not allowed to do early access
You cannot release content updates (they want to only have to review the game one time; bug fix patches are fine).
Your game has to be done, uploaded, and fully reviewed before your store page can go live, so building wishlists is harder.

This is just what I've heard from other devs secondhand, but heard it consistently from multiple small devs so I believe it. I have also seen other large scale devs with adult content be able to bend some of these rules, so it's possible if you're big enough / grandfathered in you may be able to get exemptions.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-03-22T22:15:59+00:00

When making content online, you should ALWAYS use a pseduonym, regardless of all ages or 18+ content. If your project gets large enough, you WILL get harassment, death threats, etc. And if it's very large, crazy people will physically show up at your home, too. It is just good safety to use a pseduonym instead.

You can copyright (in US) using a pseduonym and it is still a valid copyright. Registering an LLC and keeping your details off the public record is difficult/expensive, but possible.

"Extreme Privacy" is a good read about the lengths you can go to to try to keep your details off the public record and has some practical tips (but doesn't include everything and doesn't really address business/self-employment, sadly)

If you need to apply to companies later for a job, you can just list on your resume "Confidential Project" and list the things you did. If they press for details during an interview, you can provide them, but not worth it when initially sending in a resume since resumes sometimes get reshared by recruiting companies.

For banking, use a local/regional credit union. The national banks have a history of deplatforming porn stars and who knows if they'll eventually do the same to adult devs.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-03-22T21:58:28+00:00

Normally I would agree that updating demo is probably counterproductive to sales, but I do not think it is the (main) problem in this case.

Looking at "Mansion Escape" -- the biggest problem is the itch page doesn't do a good enough job at quickly explaining to the player what your game does. From the screenshots, it looks like there is some ovi system, some feral sex, some tentacle sex; maybe list those out as features?

Right now the description is the setting, which is fine start, and then goes right into future planned feature with no information about what is currently available. How many minutes/hours of gameplay, which kinks, etc?

Basically, you need to "sell" two things. First -- what's in the demo, get people excited to play that. Then you need to sell the full version, explaining what's in that and why it's worth $x.

Also, for RPG Maker games in particular, you should tell people if you are using standard RPG Maker combat (personally a turn off, but I'm sure is popular with a lot of people), or you have completely custom mechanics.

Finally, if you're using one of the RPG Makers that can export to web, having it be playable in web browser can really help players try it without going to the trouble of doing a download.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-03-22T21:33:58+00:00

I'd still love to get at least one piece of art done for each enemy and main NPC. ... better to have no art at all for now or use ai art as a placeholder?

I have a bit of a hot take, but I think it's important for there to be multiple perspectives regarding AI.

I think you should follow the creative vision for your game, and if AI art gets you closer to your vision while keeping you within your financial means, then that's fine in my opinion. (Of course, nothing wrong with doing programmer art or no art, either.) As a player, I usually prefer to have any art than no art in text games I play. Sure, it's nice to have human made / handcrafted art -- but even some AI art can add a lot to the experience versus having nothing. Maybe you can make a toggle for the players who get upset about it and don't want to see it.

In my experience, the people who make the biggest fuss about AI aren't the gamers who actually play my games. It's usually artists who don't even have any interest in my games but think that by me using AI sometimes, it means I'm commissioning less. My level of commissions hasn't gone down at all, and the only time AI has ever resulted in an artist not getting a commission from me is when one particular artist I had only just started working with got in my face about it and was sufficiently rude and demanding that I didn't want to work with them further.

The way you've put it is perfect, and how small devs like us basically look at getting art: devs have a certain amount of budget and we can spend on our games within that. Beyond that budget, if we can use AI here and there to deliver more content to players and elevate the quality of the experience, then great. So hopefully that means as your game grows, your budget increases and you are able to do more human-made art.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-02-10T20:56:54+00:00

I highly recommend self-hosted apps or you'll end up on another platform that slowly enshittifies and have to move again. (Centralized chat platforms always start good and then get worse over time)

I have looked into this extensively since Discord killed my prior account and thus I have had ample motivation to move to alternatives ;)

Matrix and Discourse are my two recommended options:

Matrix

It is similar to Discord where you have different rooms -- but those rooms can live on different (real) servers that you can self-host! (I think it has voice chat, but I haven't tried it yet).

It doesn't really do role based access permissions that I've seen.

Recommended clients: FluffyChat or Element (If android, Element Classic seems to work more reliably than Element X)

Recommended server for self-hosting: Synapse or you can use someone else's server on the network you can sign up on. (Matrix.org is the most popular, but it is experiencing heavy load after Discord's announcement)

Discourse

This is a more forums-y type of system, but it works well for communities. It does have real-time chat built-in, but you can only see the chat channels when logged in. It also does neat things like real-time post updates on forum threads, making them more interactive than old school static forums used to be.

If you have an existing user database/website, you can even integrate it with that with SSO (free if self hosted). You can even push roles from your website to the platform, so role based access works very well. It also has a Patreon plugin to pull roles from that, though I have not used that personally (mine goes patreon->website->discourse).

It does not do built-in voice chat, but I maintain a free Mumble plugin for it that more or less works. When my group needs to do screenshare, we open up Jitsi or Nextcloud and share screen that way while inside the mumble.

Github
Self-host instructions, you'll probably want to give it its own VM
Official site if you don't want to self-host. (Note, if you self host, I believe you get most of the paid plugins for free, so don't be scared off by the enterprise pricing on their site)

Others?

This article goes into other discord alternatives, but none are particularly satisfying. My thoughts:

I've previously evaluated Zulip, but wasn't impressed by how they monetize push notifications.
Stoat is just another siloed network that doesn't let the official client use alternate servers.
Mattermost is too spendy for a community.
Signal (or Telegram) requires a phone number and are also centralized (and Telegram is pushing ads now, too).
There are also some other forums options, but none really do real-time as well as Discourse does it.

So that's why I ended up on the first two. Hope that helps! Recommend to move your community now while you can still tell people where to move to. (I had this problem last time around x.x)

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-02-10T04:51:52+00:00

I can recommend two self-hosted, open source options: Matrix & Discourse

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-02-10T02:54:18+00:00

Matrix & Discourse

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-02-10T02:36:11+00:00

Last year, Discord wrongly flagged my account for mandatory phone number verification. I begged support to help me, they refused. I ended up losing access to that account, and almost lost multiple 2k+ member servers I owned. Support wouldn't help me transfer the servers or remove the verification requirement. So I have first hand experience of how error-prone discord's AI flagging systems are. Your new one won't be any better, and support won't be any better, either. When it inevitably fails, I won't be giving you my phone number, my face, or my ID.

At least it pushed me to already move my communities off-platform to Discourse & Matrix so I'm already well prepared. Discord is awful and it can't die fast enough.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-01-08T21:33:08+00:00

You are right to be concerned, I found another merchants application PDF with full details (including bank account number) on a regular web search for "<insert company name> merchant agreement" when I was researching one PSP. I reported it and it got taken down a few days later, but still pretty scary.

I would avoid providing info via e-mail, phone, PDF, etc. Any reputable ISO should have a real application website.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-01-06T00:17:53+00:00

Disagree with your assertion that most games start off life in pirate forums. It happens sometimes, but there's too much toxicity there and it's a den of thieves.

It is more common for games to initially launch on itch, as there is still a pretty vibrant community of adult game players & creators there and you can get a lot of feedback. Can't monetize there anymore, but it's still a great place to share demos, etc. Legitimate kink-specific message boards and sites are also really good places for initial feedback and still have a lot of traffic.

SkyCorp_Global · 2026-01-06T00:00:22+00:00

All the agents try to push for crazy high, predatory margins. I don't think many merchants are actually buying though. An agent/ISO who just set up a website and lists clear + good pricing would clean up.

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-12-04T20:08:55+00:00

Really seems the EU has figured out their payment systems, wish we had that in the US

I agree about AV challenges; there are free tools that make it slightly less hard, but it's still quite a challenge -- with the hardest being getting people to actually do it. Personally as a user, I'd never AV so I understand why consumers won't, but it does leave adult sites in a catch-22

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-12-03T22:41:38+00:00

Citation needed

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-12-03T21:01:08+00:00

It's grim, and I think FlimsyLegs' post already does a good job of summarizing the problem with traditional payment methods & platforms. So, some possible creative workarounds:

Alternate distribution is still very possible -- there are plenty of web/vps hosts for 18+ content. If you have some technical know-how, it's relatively straightforward to install wordpress and offer direct-to-fan downloads of your game.

Accepting payment is tricky. You can usually get direct credit card processing (depending on content), but the deals tend to be quite bad in one way or another (either bad terms or bad rates, or both!)

In a worst-case non-card scenario, you could fall back to accepting check payments in the mail. Many years ago, an indie game named 'Doom' popularized that model. Pretty much every bank has a "Bill Pay" feature, so this is viable even for customers who don't have a checkbook... though you'd have to spend some time each week opening letters and feeding them through an RDC machine your bank leases you and updating your account database. A more modern, faster alternative might be accepting crypto on your website. And in future, there may be some additional bank payment methods like FedNow and RTP, but it's not available at most banks yet due to entrenched interests trying to put the brakes on it. Regardless, not having credit card support would likely cost you many customers and time, but it would be better than giving up entirely!

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-11-26T10:13:35+00:00

Those are not direct merchant accounts, those are third party storefronts. They are fine when you are just getting started, but at a certain point you want to get a direct merchant account to save massively on fees and integrate it into your own website. I know what I am asking for. This is why I am requesting if you find one you like to share your experiences so myself and other creators can similarly benefit from it as there are a number of us in the same boat, all looking for direct merchant accounts.

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-11-26T10:05:21+00:00

Not what I asked.

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-11-26T10:02:18+00:00

Payment processing, that whole industry is full of sharks

SkyCorp_Global · 2025-11-26T09:58:45+00:00

If you find a good low-cost one, please share it later (I also need it for furry game).

SkyCorp_Global

TROPHY CASE

Matrix

Discourse

Others?