You click a button. You get coffee. You come back in 15 minutes.
Your visual novel is done.
It’s garbage.
The Setup
Jake automated visual novel production. One skill. 500 lines of text. Five stages inside:
- Describe the characters and locations
- Map who appears where
- Generate the slides (nano-banana AI)
- Run a critic to check quality
- Export
Cost per novel: $27. Mostly API calls.
This used to take a team weeks. Now it takes coffee.
The novels sell for $5-6k. The ROI is somewhere around 200x, if you’re the kind of person who tracks that sort of thing. Jake is not. He’s too busy clicking buttons from the passenger seat of his Uber.
“I haven’t felt this in a long time — I literally don’t stop. In an Uber, something’s generating. Yesterday I had my laptop on the passenger seat, periodically clicking. It’s just insane.”
The Problem
Characters change hairstyles between slides. Locations rearrange their furniture. A hero who was blonde on slide 4 becomes a brunette on slide 7. The forest behind them grows an extra tree. Sometimes two.
All technically correct output. Consistently unwatchable.
Which of the 5 stages caused this?
You don’t know. You can’t know. You edited a prompt, clicked the button, drank your coffee, and now the protagonist has a different face. Was it Stage 2? Stage 3? Did Stage 4’s critic just… not notice?
You take a guess. You change something in the character description stage. You click the button again. You get more coffee. You come back.
Different problem.
Roll back. Try something else. Click. Coffee. Wait.
Still wrong.
That’s an hour of your life. Every time. Not debugging — guessing in 15-minute intervals while your coffee gets cold.
The Lighthouse Project
Jake’s most ambitious novel. Multiple heroes. Multiple locations. Hit the technical wall hard: nano-banana can only hold 3 reference images in memory at once.
Can’t maintain consistency for more than one hero plus one background.
Solution: creative workarounds invented on the fly. Every workaround a new thing that could break something else. Every iteration another 15 minutes to find out if it did.
“Fear of changing what works. One wrong edit and the regression risk kills you.”
What SkillCanvas Changes
You load the skill. You see five blocks. You see arrows between them.
You click on Stage 3. You see what went in. You see what came out.
There. That’s where the hero turned blonde. Stage 2 is fine. Stage 3 did something stupid.
Fix that. Run it again.
Not guessing. Knowing.
Want to add voice acting? Drag a new block between generation and critic. Visually. Done.
Numbers
| What | Number |
|---|---|
| Cost per novel | $27 |
| Active work | ~5 hours |
| Previous method | Team, weeks |
| Sale price | $5-6k |
| ROI | ~200x |
| Time spent guessing | Significantly less now |