Vile Veggies - Devlog #9 - 07.16.25 - videogame solo development log

Dear Devlog,

What a week! Well at least there's so much to do, it's impossible to be bored. Let's review:

Thursday - I think I recorded missing character lines and got the game's audio system figured out. I edited sound clips that weren't timed properly in Adobe Audition. I also made sure the Sound options menu (made with this tutorial by Sasquatch B Studios) which involves a sound mixer was working as intended. This separates sounds into different sliders which for my game are currently: Sound FX, Dialogue, Music and Master.

Friday - I think Friday was when I added phone tones to each number so each number has its own accurate tone when pressed. I'm very excited about this because this will enable players to play phone tone songs! 🎶 I also wrote a script that plays songs in randomized order after waiting a randomized amount of minutes with a fade in with the help of this tutorial by ACDev and this tutorial by Luvseatshawty.

Saturday - I assembled an input manager script to put all the inputs into one place that could then access all the scripts that the player inputs affect. This took a lot of patience because at first I thought I broke everything but it turned out my dialogue manager script was running a method to keep switching a camera back on even after exiting the phone view and the input action map was switched back to gameplay. I currently have an input system that uses two action maps: one for player gameplay when the player is running around and exploring and a UI action map for when the player is in menus or interacting with an item/puzzle. I could tweak this in the future but I'll have to take care to update all the necessary input scripts.

Sunday - I started the day by drawing a pickle texture for a new menu background. Eventually I powered on stream and spent my day setting up a menu that enables the player to customize their controls and reset them if needed. This was made possible with another great tutorial by Sasquatch B Studios!

Monday - I streamed my morning of modeling décor for Chapter 1's apartment. The world is populated by produce people (conscious beings made of vegetables and fruits) so by that logic I decided instead of house plants they would have house meats. This resulted in the fried chicken house meat I'll put as this post's main image. I then tested a house meat with hair but I think that resulting mesh has too many polygons.

Tuesday - yesterday I redesigned the model for Chapter 2's environment after deciding the hallway was too long which took a lot of tweaking vertices.

Today - I tested out a way to make 2D photos act as 3D models with box colliders and rigid bodies to create physics based movement. The specific example I was testing was a coin bouncing around a drawer. The coin was a thin cube model with a circle texture on it making the corners of the model invisible. It took some finagling with nodes in blender to get the transparency acting how I wanted. (This tutorial helped!) Then in Unity I had to play with the material once more to get the transparency acting right. To get the coin model to bounce around in the drawer, I added slippery physics materials to the coin item's collider and the drawer's colliders that the coin would sit on. (With the help of this tutorial) The coin didn't bounce/slide around however until I turned on the rigid body setting "interpolate."

I then brainstormed what objects could be rewarding for players to discover in the scene's abundance of drawers and cabinets (mostly world and lore building items). I have 21 drawers and 18 cabinet drawers and decided at least 75 % of them should have some sort of rewarding item inside that's either examinable for lore or a fun interactive Easter egg like a bonus phone number to dial. Then I spent my afternoon modeling glass bottles in Blender.

The 2D texture on 3D model experiment is giving me ideas on possibilities for ways to create an aesthetic in the world. Like how would an image sequence with a changing outline look? Could this be a way to make flat yet animated characters that always face the player? That probably wouldn't fit in the current 3D world but if I make enough items this way, it could create a cohesion.

House meats decorate homes in the universe of Vile Veggies!