... is an upcoming Choicescript interactive fiction game! You can follow development updates on the dev blog here, view the forum page here, and play the demo here.
Villain Intern is currently about 1/4 of the way into Chapter Two: Inhuman Resources as of 2/8/26, sitting at just over 72,000 words.
[FAQ Here and character introductions here, for newer readers]
Play as an aspiring supervillain interning at UnderHand, a legacy criminal corporation. Start from the bottom and navigate a world where everyone has it out for you, leveraging your strange superhuman abilities and your knack for manipulation. Make a name for yourself as an executive villain (with your own swanky corner office!), or turn against your higher-ups and usurp the company,…or throw away your promising career for the greater good, I guess...
Powers and Customization:
Choose from two different ability trees. Play as either a homemade cyborg with (painful looking) mechanical augmentations of your own design, or a genetically mutated freak with mysterious, bizarre abilities derived from animal genes. Choose 3 of the 9 unique abilities available for each power type, which update (or mutate) to scale as you get stronger. Climb walls, perfectly mimic any voice, rotate your head 360 degrees, talk to the AI assistant in your brain, etc etc!
As a rule, you start out villainous, but whether you’re charming or sinister, sniveling or demanding, and backstabbing or frontstabbing is up to you.
Relationship progression tracks two major stats- your connection with a character, and your rivalry, which are not mutually exclusive. So you can romance your greatest nemesis, backstab your closest friend, that kind of thing. Or both at once, with the same person, even.
Fellow Interns:
👾 Peter Hyde is your cubicle neighbor, a geeky slackoff who’s fond of novelty ties. Unlike you, Peter doesn’t really want to be here, but he seems for some reason unable to quit. Laid-back, conflict avoidant, and generally easy to manipulate, he’s easy minion material for the MC- but his attitude belies a volatile, monstrous secret. Which can be a great asset or a major risk, depending on if you can maintain your control over him.
🤖 T9-670 is a seven-foot tall ex-war machine. Once a military member conscripted to UnderHand’s private security decal, its contract didn’t end when it died- the soldier’s brain was transplanted into a humanoid steel frame with a dark glass plate for a face. T9 is doing some soul searching- it’s not totally sure if it even has one left, but it would like to have a purpose beyond fixing printers and mowing down UnderHand’s enemies with its plasma gun.
🔬 Dr. Dr. Elaine Foster is an up-and-coming mad scientist, assistant to the esteemed Dr. Shrink. Don’t bring up the fact that she has two doctorates and is still an intern. She’s a genius prodigy, but otherwise has no superhuman abilities, which causes her to be overlooked by your superiors. Passionate and inscrutable, she’s obsessed with making it to the top her own way, and will remain one step ahead of you if you aren’t careful.
🧪 Reid/Reney Sullivan (gender selectable, nb included) is your nemesis, or at least they think so. They’re employed by OverSight, the subsidized hero-corporation that works in tandem with the government. An interning hero with impressive telekinetic powers, they are nonetheless as much of an amateur as you, and so you find yourself on even footing with one of the most promising superheroes in the business. Earnest and witty, they genuinely just want to help people. Eventually, they become fixated on “figuring you out”, which can lead to them getting sucked into your schemes. That, or their meddling could be your downfall. Worst of all, they might even succeed in reforming you.
There’s also 👁️ Blink, a rogue superhuman- some say vigilante, others say independent villain. Completely anonymous, they wear a unique suit of tactical gear that allows them to turn completely invisible, the first of its kind. Quippy, chipper, and sauntering, they tend to use their powers for ridiculous, showy things like popping up behind newscasters on TV. An invisible superhuman that loves the spotlight, Blink is full of contradictions. And secrets, big ones, that pertain to you.
… plus a cast of older, more established villains and heroes- including The Man, UnderHand’s enigmatic CEO. A faceless, hollow man in an empty suit. Actually, nobody’s ever seen anything but the suit, so he might just be the suit.
FURTHER READING:
🌃THE PINTEREST BOARD
🎧THE PLAYLIST
TAG ORGANIZATION:
VI Updates - The big stuff, new demo content
VI Info - The info posts, development news
VI Asks - Anything coming through the inbox
VI Characters - Character related info/bonus content
VI Sketches - Doodles and concept art
Lore - What it says on the tin. Anything worldbuildy
The Fridge - The place of honor for fan art! Pinned to my imaginary fridge with a digital magnet
I don't really know how to actually start this but heyoooooooo! It's been a while and I've been on and off but I'm officially back again!
I know I say I'm coming back a lot but I do legitimately mean it this time! XD I've had a LOT of stuff on my plate to deal with but I'm trying to take everything one step at a time.
I got a LOT of new art to share so I'm happy to get that started tomorrow!
Overall, it's been a really strange and tumultuous time for me but it's beginning to mellow out somewhat. I've been trying get back to enjoying making art and such and recovering from kinda the absolute emotional black hole I was in last year. It's gotten a lot better since then but y'know. Recovery still takes time.
In any case, I'm not sure if I'll get back to making Stanley Parable stuff soon. Part of my funk was subconsciously forcing myself into making content for the engagement it got me and while I do feel myself going through the withdrawal of not having a whole bunch of engagement like before, I think it's ultimately healthier. It helps to get me back to making art I'm currently interested in. That being said, I WILL return to it but in my own time. Not gonna rush things too much.
That being said, I'm hoping everyone is open to seeing more of my other stuff! Phantom of the Opera is probably the biggest thing on my brain at the moment so be prepared to see some of that XD. I also really want to share more of my OCs as well!
And once again, I'm kinda planning to share more casual writing on here. Kinda like opinion pieces/reviews of stuff and headcanons a bit more freely. (One of the things about me that I've realized is that I really held myself back bc of my perfectionism and unnecessary need to prove myself in fandom spaces so no more of that.)
Anyway, I'm rambling. I'm excited to start kind of a new chapter here on Tumblr! As bad as my experience of a lot of personal stuff was last year, it's definitely taught me a lot in how to approach things this time around this year! And I hope y'all continue to join me in this journey. 😁😁
-> (That’s 58k words total, to be clear! About 28k more than the original 30k or so.)
Play it here, and talk to me about it here, or here!
Details and devtalk below the cut.
Here's what you can expect this time around!...
An awkward dinner
An illicit phone call
Finally, you take a shower
And for next time...
🤖I’m putting together a chapter interlude, which will be a very short little story switching perspectives & elaborating on the scope of the hero vs. villain conflict. It’ll also introduce our big bads, who we haven’t yet seen!
🤖After that comes chapter 2, which is when the reeeall branching begins. You’ll finally learn what exactly is up with Hyde, and you’ll get to start doing missions, which are the real meat of the game. Most following chapters will offer a choice between assorted supervillain shit to do- think heists, assassinations, brawls with various heroes, undercover assignments, all that good stuff.
🤖Whichever mission you don’t pick will not repeat in later chapters to increase replayability. I’m also hoping to let you choose who to take with you into the field, which can change the events and outcome. This’ll take a lot of words, but idgaf, worth it.
Fixed the hidden fight on floor four to work with the new combat system
Fixed a plot hole that involved you losing your key card and then miraculously having it again
I'm a very long ways away from adding a screenreader mode, which is a true bummer. I use a lot of special characters and visual elements, so it'll be a big job to go back in and make those accessible. It's still something I'm committed to eventually patching in before the final release!
Forewarning, this is a shorter demo update! This is because I've been finagling with the combat hella. Trying to figure out how to make it work. Expect a follow-up-update (another 15kish) soon!
TL;DR- I'm testing a combat system before I fully move forward and polish/drop more story. Don't want to put my cart before the horse. Would like to know if you guys think it works!
Essentially, the way I wanted to do this game involved a ton of different little superpowers. 18 abilities total, with like over 50 possible combinations. Giving equal flavor text to all those different kinds of players, making your abilities feel impactful, making them work in conjunction- all a huge task.
It started overwhelming the story (classic IF fumble), so I knew I needed a new approach, but I didn't want to lose any of the customization and flavor text!! I love that stuff.
So I'm trialing a kind of turn-based thing. The update is better at explaining it than I could here! Let me know if this is something you could see working throughout the game (or not! That's cool too!)
If you like to toss up feedback, this one is for u! But if you prefer to read more polished drafts, by all means hold out until the next demo changes. I'll be putting out a sister update super soon, I just couldn't blow past the combat without working out its kinks.
More development blabber under the cut 🤘
🤖 Screen reader accessibility is absolutely on my mind! Unfortunately I keep running into reasons to use special characters 😵💫. It's still in my plans to go back through eventually and do a screen reader mode, but I don't expect to start that until I have the story pinned down more. More on this later.
🤖 I found, also, a little plot hole in the prologue. At one point you could get your keycard destroyed and then immediately use your keycard to get lunch at the cafeteria. Something shall be done about this
🤖 I also plan to rework the fight with the henchman on floor four. You can kind of see the combat problems I was running into there- you only get like 1 or 2 choices when attacking him (boring!) because I was only able to write like one for each ability. And it was still so much text lol. That scene will be freshened up, but for now I locked it down. For 2 reasons: the combat needs updating, and also it prevents the aforementioned plot hole
Heyo! Once again, been on and off, but not just on Tumblr, on most of my social media. 😭😭
It’s been a chaotic time for me as of late, I will be honest. Been trying to adjust to a LOT of different life changes. I had one HELL of a Fall semester last year and as such, I took the Spring semester off but then I had to pay off a lot of debt so I opened commissions and kinda survived for the past couple months on doing those.
But as I did commissions —and really only commissions, I had time to do some art of my own but not nearly as much as I wanted— I realized several things.
I realized that I was capable of so much more than I was self conscious about in my art. I worried that I was not good enough to do a lot of the things I wanted, specifically comics and sequential storytelling. And as I made more people’s ideas and characters come to life, I realized I could do the same for myself and my characters. That I have a unique kind of voice and way of doing things that people resonate with. And I should cherish and nurture that.
So I wanna try desperately to do that again. To pick up my projects I felt I failed and give them justice.
That being said, updates will DEFINITELY be slower but I will definitely be working on some good stuff coming forward. 👌👌
Another update is that I definitely want to write my thoughts and opinions on here more often than before. Bc again, I feel like it might have better value on here than on Instagram stories of all things 😭😭 Mainly bc it can stay up longer than 24 hours dhsjjs.
So I hope y’all on here enjoy my ramblings from time to time.
Anyway, thanks for reading this ramble. Just wanted to share my current headspace at the moment.
(Also just a note: commissions are indeed closed, not sure when I might open them again. 😬 I’ll be returning to my Fall semester this year so I might not have the time to balance classwork and that. Again, not sure.)
(I’ll also continue to add more of my art from earlier this year onto here. And I’ll also try to update my Twitter/X 😭😭).
