A Long & Sappy Retrospective on Veins Like Tapeworms’ Development

Hi everyone! It’s been a little over a month and a half since I finally released Veins Like Tapeworms, and I still can’t get the story out of my head, especially now that we’ve hit 10 reviews.

I want to say straight up this is not an announcement I’m working on DLC, an expansion, etc. While I do have scrapped concept art and early routes that never made it into the game I’d like to revisit at some point, I’m still exhausted! I’ve been taking a break to recover and let the dust settle since release. I’m just one person, and making a game essentially by yourself (no matter how large or small) is an enormous feat.

I started writing down some of my thoughts a little while ago to work out how I was feeling about the game in its final state, and I figured a few curious folk might want to read them too. This is mostly just me talking about myself, the development process, my real-life issues that delayed release for five months, and shouting out some people who really shaped VLT into what it is. Don’t hold your breath for any major news.

This won’t be a big, professional post or anything. I’d rather get my candid thoughts on the paper than spend all my time tweaking how it sounds and risk losing what I’m trying to say.

The Development Process

Did you know that Veins Like Tapeworms is actually made in RPGMaker? (It’s in the MZ version, if we want to get really specific!) It’s true; I’ve had a bunch of people tell me they didn’t even know it was an RPGM game until I said it myself! This is because I had a horrible, no-good, terrible idea to make a visual novel with RPGMaker. I do not recommend doing this. VLT turned out phenomenal in spite of its engine, not because of it.

That’s not the point, though. I’m not exactly sure how the concept of VLT came about; if I had to place one solid “origin story,” it would revolve around me getting back into the concept of Eddie Brock and Venom sometime in mid-2023. I had a moment where I suddenly went hey, what if the host was actually a really bad person and the other was just an enabler? After cooking up some basic concepts here and there, I grabbed my pen and made this little sketch of a duo I’d later call Demian and Slyce!

Demian mostly stayed intact throughout the design process, but Slyce’s manifestation totally changed from its original concept! It went from an abstract monster on all fours and too many eyespots to an abstract rot-titan with a maw like flowers and teeth like thorns.

I didn’t immediately jump into the game development process with Demian, mind you. At first, their concept was a short story at best. I have the opening of that original draft stashed away somewhere, but it was about 1,000 words long and mostly the first few segments of the final game’s Chapter 1. I was still working on another visual novel at the time, actually! It was called No Time for Mercy (also made in RPGMaker, of course), and I kind of consider it my first “official” commercial game. I was thinking up the concept for a massive game jam that ran from September-October 2023. I wasn’t allowed to work on any real assets until the jam was running, so the most I could do was polish the concept to perfection. It was my pride and joy at the time, my absolute magnum opus; even now, I’m tempted to revisit NTFM with what I’ve learned to put some extra polish on it.

At the time, all my creative juices were being directed to NTFM, and VLT kind of got pushed to the wayside. I wouldn’t think about VLT again until early 2024 — I was hot off the heels of perfecting No Time for Mercy, and I was itching to make something new. Something dark, something violent and almost cruel. I went trawling through my hard drive and found that VLT draft just sitting there. One thing led to another, and… well, I churned out the first draft of Chapter 1 in a few days.

I think I kind of knew, looking at that Ch1 draft, that VLT was going to be a visual novel. Problem is, it just didn’t feel right as an ADV VN (that being the typical formatting style most people think of when they hear about visual novels). Forgive the messy art, but look at this screenshot of NTFM, compared to VLT.

There’s a lot less text on the screen as an ADV visual novel than with VLT’s format, the NVL style. I tried drafting up a version of Ch1 that worked in ADV style, but something about the pacing just didn’t feel right. I will say that I’m entirely self-taught as a writer, artist and developer; if there’s a professional way of describing what makes ADV vs. NVL tick, I don’t know it. This, like everything else I do, is based solely on a gut feeling.

So, it was off to the races with nothing but a vague concept of how things would end and a rough draft of an opening! What followed was an absolute headache of trying to get RPGMaker to run an NVL-style VN. Those who know this engine know what I went through, but for those who don’t, let me just say this: while RPGMaker can be really flexible in some surprising aspects, it’s disgustingly rigid in others. Trying to alter those aspects feels like being mentally attacked by a brick. There are still some things I was never able to achieve with VLT because of this engine. I do not know why I stuck with RPGMaker. All I know is that this is probably my last big project with it, solely because of how bad development went with VLT.

Despite the odds, I got it working! It took a mishmash of plugins and some creative workarounds, but RPGMaker could officially run a visual novel in the style I envisioned Veins Like Tapeworms in! All that was left was the rest of the story and to draw all the art. I will say this, though – even as a visual novel, VLT didn’t start off as a grand, 8-chapter, 100,000 word, 6-ending concept. I actually put it in the ballpark of having 15,000 words and one ending at best. Y’know, something I could easily knock out in a month! I just had to outline the story events and write the game itself.

…Yeah, that “15,000 word” idea went out the window when Chapters 1 and 2 combined were 13,000 words in itself. Then the ballpark became 30,000 words. Then 50,000. Then 70,000. I gave up trying to figure out what the final wordcount would be when I was midway through Chapter 6 and it was ~10,000 words. I was just going to let the story play out on the screen and see all the weird little flaws and nuances that would surface. I think this was around the time I realized “hey, I’ve got a great idea on my hands here. Why not put it on Steam, where more people can read it when it drops?”

Going to Steam is when I got really, really serious about development. This wasn’t a little itchio project anymore — this was big. This was Steam. I had to make it perfect, if I wanted my Steam-debut to be successful. I fell into a pretty bad cycle of overworking that, to this day, I kind of look back on and cringe at how hard I was pushing myself. Wake up, eat, write/draw/program, eat, think about VLT, market, eat, sleep, write, repeat. I had friends telling me to take a break, relax, scale back my efforts a little. I really wish I listened!

I will say, though. The final stretch of development turned into an absolute nightmare, and that was because of…

Moving House

I’m not going to beat around the bush. Around November, I went through a big house-move that went… less than spectacular. I mentioned it on my Steam community posts here and there along with my BlueSky, but it’s been difficult on me and VLT’s development process. I won’t go into all the details, but it resulted in me getting sick for the majority of March, having days where I’m so exhausted I can’t even open RPGMaker, days where I’m in a barely-furnished house with a laptop that can’t playtest, etc. I’d do what I could throughout the process, but development time was significantly worsened for months on end.

I feel like if the move hadn’t gotten in the way, I could’ve released VLT on my original planned date. That’s one of the few things I actually regret about the development process, not working hard enough on the game while I could before my workflow got upended. I know, I know, it sounds like an excuse – “of course I’m not working on my game, I’ve been moving and it’s been a slow, painful process because my family doesn’t want to hire professionals” – but it really has been my biggest setback throughout development. Even at the end of the process, when I’d had the game essentially feature-complete, I couldn’t stress test it for a few more weeks because it was back down to the old house to get it ready for selling.

Those of you who were there for the release of VLT probably remember it was a little messy on Day 1. One user reported a bug that completely blocked them from the endings on the main route, another one found out one of the dynamic sentences wasn’t hooked to anything and just spat a blank space, and I myself found (by complete chance) that Chapter 6 would send you to Ch7 early if you tried to speak to a certain someone at a cafe. My real-life issues were exactly why it was a bit messy for that first week; I would’ve had it absolutely bug-free if I wasn’t so burnt-out from driving, unpacking, re-packing, and dealing with a laptop from 2003 with 2 GB of RAM. Sorry you all had to deal with the day-1 wrinkles; no one else is more upset about it than I am, I swear.

Hell, there was a final wrench thrown in at the day of release, too: my internet provider, T-Mobile, went totally kaput in the hours leading up to going live. It would take five minutes just for a simple text-only page to load. I was terrified it would go completely down at the moment of release, but it prevailed just enough to go gold.

But that’s enough griping for now; it’s time for the shout-outs to everyone who made VLT possible!

Shout-Outs

I said earlier that I was developing the game basically solo. I was the writer, the artist, the programmer, and the marketer; if I’d had someone else at the helm of any of these roles, I’m sure the game would’ve come out much sooner, but I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist. That said, there were a few people who stepped in and really helped me out in sections that I lacked the skill to fulfill myself!

You can see a lot of their names in the credits of the game after completing an ending, but I figured I’d just list a bunch of people out here, and what they did.

TheKrazyStew — Have you watched the absolutely phenomenal trailer for VLT? If you did, you'd see they were both edited by TheKrazyStew himself! He's one of my oldest and closest friends, and my works would not be the same without him, VLT especially.

Honestly, Stew's helped me with a lot more with the pre-writing process of the game, and he was absolutely invaluable with the messy backend stuff near the end of development. He's an aspiring game developer himself, too; bouncing ideas back and forth about our characters is a great pastime of ours, and I'm super excited to see what he makes in the future!

Give his BlueSky a follow; tell him Trinket sent you, and she's pretty sure she'll let go of RPGMaker at some point.

sugarcoatedmoth — If you've leafed around VLT even a little, you'll notice pretty much every UI window that isn't the main textbox has this really nice, goopy pattern to it. It's subtle, but really meshes well with the overall feel of the game.

This was made by my good friend, sugarcoatedmoth! He's a natural at UI stuff and pixel art; he did a great job, especially since he was just working off my vague directions of “here's a color palette and a general idea, please help.” We've actually collaborated on a game before, on itchio! Give his Tumblr a follow, tell him Trinket sent you, and she promises she'll start cooking up that remake collaboration soon.

The_Red_Inkling — Did you notice the voice-lines peppered throughout the game in a few routes? That’s the voice of one of my good friends, The_Red_Inkling! Earlier drafts of VLT went from being voiceless, to having my own voice put under 15 different filters for the background, and now you can hear strange and unusual noises done by an actual voice actor! Inkling’s really talented at what he does, and I’ve been watching him take on better roles and improving by the day. Give his BlueSky a follow for me, tell him Trinket sent ‘ya and that she appreciates him lending his voice for that grubby little idiot we call Demian.

(Oh, and thanks for being so patient with me, buddy. Voice-lines were one of the final things I solidified, so it underwent way too many changes until the last minute possible.)

Black Tabby Games — This is going to sound kind of ridiculous, but I don’t think VLT would be the game it is now without Black Tabby Games’ phenomenal visual novel Slay the Princess. Seriously, it’s one of my all-time favorite VNs, if not somewhere in my top 3 all-time favorite games. I played it while VLT was early in development (a little while after releasing the original demo on itchio), and to say it totally reshaped how I saw my own game would be an understatement. Slyce wasn’t as layered as it is now, Demian was mostly classified as “a bad-person protagonist who you’re supposed to hate in every path” and the themes about the cycle of abuse were basically nonexistent!

It’s weird to think a story like Slay the Princess (a beautiful tale about relationships and time loops) could hold such a heavy influence on Veins Like Tapeworms (a rotten, disgusting tale about abuse and flower gods), but I cannot stress enough how influential it was to me — more specifically, my favorite route, “The Networked Wild” absolutely changed VLT to what it is now. If you’re still reading this, give Black Tabby Games my thanks for me; I gave ‘em a little ping on BlueSky when I first released VLT, and I’m too shy to do it again.

Closing Thoughts

I think, in its current state, Veins Like Tapeworms is in a place I’m totally satisfied with showing off to the public. I’ll still come back to it to do janitor work here and there, cleaning up bugs when reported and making sure the core loop is air-tight, but I’m not actively looking to expand the game any further. I do have pieces of scrapped content that I think could make for a nice DLC or update, but for what it’s worth if I never touch VLT again I’d be happy with how it is. The next big thing I’m going to be focusing on is a completely different project, but getting VLT onto Mac devices is still on the radar.

I know I’ve said this a lot in my development updates, but thank you all for being so patient with me. You guys mean so much to me, even if you don’t know it. This is the biggest project I’ve ever completed in my entire life, and my first ever Steam release. It’s always going to have a special spot in my heart, and the wonderful reception I’ve gotten is a major part of it. I’m sure I’ll come back to Steam eventually, with another title that’s my new baby, but for now, I’m going to rest and recover. Working on a game for a year straight completely solo burns a person out, even if it’s their passion project.

I’d still do it again any time, though. Just… only after the idea of spending 12 hours a day in RPGMaker sounds appealing again. I might pick up a new engine after the hype of VLT dies down; who knows?

See you in my next project!

-Trinket