You Are What You Eat
OCTOBER 2025 //You Are What You Eat is a short visual novel horror game where you meet a strange monster in a house in the woods, and must make many decisions that will affect how the story progresses and how the monster feels about you.
ABOUT THE PROJECT //You Are What You Eat was created for the 'Scream Jam 2025' competition in just two weeks. It’s a short, visual novel horror game where you come upon a mysterious house in the woods and must make a variety of interesting decisions that will affect how the game progresses and ends.
Credits:
Developer: Rulon Adams / @Rulyguy
Music: Cole Krochmal & TurtleBox - Obscurus
SOLO DEVELOPMENT //For this game jam, some other developer friends and I decided to each create our own project and circle back to see how things went after the jam ended. Since my strong point is design, and my weaker points are coding and art, I had to be smart about how I went about this project. Because programming would be simple and I could cut a lot of corners with art creation while still making it look good, I decided on the visual novel format.
As you can see in the linked dev log, I initially tried to create a custom visual novel program in Unity using a tutorial so I could have more control, but after a few days I realized this was way too overkill for my goals, so I ended up having to scrap all that progress and pivot to using Ren’Py. It was frustrating and a tough decision, but I think the experience was a very valuable lesson in scope and flexibility.
It took a little more crunch than I’d like to admit, but I did end up completing the project, so definitely a successful game jam.
WRITING //Being a visual novel programmed in Ren’Py, the coding, design, and writing aspects became highly intertwined. I started by writing the story and all the decisions and branching paths in a Google Doc so I could focus on the design and writing aspects, my strong suits, before transferring the writing into Ren’Py and adding all the code elements to make it work.
From there, I just needed to keep refining the writing and coding so that everything was timed properly and didn’t read strangely while playing. This process was very doable within the timeframe given, but since I was a bit behind due to my Unity efforts, I wasn’t able to get as much work done on it as I would have hoped.
ART //While I am not a stranger to drawing and art, I had to be smart about how I went about creating assets because I was definitely out of practice. I decided to go for a hand-drawn style so that any errors in my drawing would fit with the style. I used a pixelly pen tool for the monster assets and created it using blocky shapes and flat colors. The backgrounds were altered, pixellated pictures of the real world, and I altered built in Ren’Py assets for the UI.
