Interviewing McSkinny, Co-writer of Echo

Another interview with a Visual Novel creator for my upcoming video!

This one is with McSkinny, a co-writer of Echo, and creator of A Role to Play: https://echoproject.itch.io/a-role-to-play

He preferred not to be recorded, so he responded in text form, so you can either watch me read his answers aloud in the video above, or just scroll down and read them yourself:

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What made you want to make a furry visual novel?

I didn’t actively seek out to make a furry visual novel. I only considered myself a furry by the label of the term for a single year back when I was 15 years old. That said, Blackgate was the first visual novel I ever played, and it was also the first time I encountered a videogame made with someone like me (a gay dude) as the target audience. For those not in the know, since I doubt Keith will ever cover this game on his channel, Blackgate features a sort of Undertale-esque setup with a protagonist finding themselves transported into a town filled with monsters (not-exclusively of the furry variety, but mostly). The player is given a frankly absurdly large variety of characters and routes to go pursue, which is partially why the game is still not completed to this day. Echo started as a side-project from Blackgate, though it quickly became its own thing under Howly, and I started working on it two years later in 2017.

What resources do you recommend for learning how to code a VN?

The number one thing I would recommend for someone looking to make a Ren’py engine visual novel is to open up other visual novels and see how they coded them. There are so many times I saw something in a VN and would wonder how they pulled it off in the engine. With Ren’py, it’s easy enough to just plug in the script files and see which combination of commands were used to accomplish the desired effects. There’s also plenty of documentation available online that will teach you the basics. Hell, Chat GPT can be a friend here. You can describe what you are trying to code and it will often spit out some examples of how to make it happen.

How should one go about assembling a team to work on a VN?

“Forming a team” is not something I’d consider a priority when first starting out. You’ll accomplish your best work in fits of creative madness at 3:00 AM all by your lonesome. That said, you may end up seeking people to do some of the creative/technical work you don’t have the skills for yourself (art, coding, music, and so forth). I often made “dream lists” of skilled individuals I would love to hire, and put their information down in one place before sending them each emails with information about the project and what work I was looking to get done. If they’re interested, it’s important that contracts are signed sorting out the rights of the work at time of hiring. There are plenty of templates available online for commissioning. 

What goes into leading a team for this kind of project?

It depends on the scale of the project. Just make sure to keep track of payments you agreed to in your contracts. A spreadsheet will do the job. I imagine that creative differences and personality conflicts can spring up, too, but I don’t have too much advice on that front.

From where do you source your free assets?

YouTube and Google Images, mostly.

How do you maintain the motivation to keep working on your project? This seems to be the biggest barrier that keeps people from making something.

Well, ordinarily, the visual novel should serve as your creative outlet and that’s often a good motivator in and of itself. That said, you’re likely to hit uninspired slumps while writing the dull bits before you reach the “really cool stuff” you had in mind when you started the visual novel (likely gay dudes kissing each other). I finished Echo in-part because I knew folks were paying their hard-earned money every month to see content from us, and the fear of disappointing them was a great motivator. So, yeah, fear. Fear is my final answer.

Do you make a living off of your VN, or do you have a day job?

I have a full-time job, though when I started work on Echo, I was unemployed and living with my parents. I would try to hide what I was writing from them, but I accidentally sent a picture of Leo to my Dad’s printer and he kept asking me “who the fox guy is”. I said he was a sports mascot. 

How much does it cost to create a VN?

Depends how much of the work you can do yourself. A handful of sprite sets and some good CG’s will set you back a couple thousand dollars. It sounds like a lot, but the barrier to entry is much cheaper than other mediums such as novel publishing, filmmaking, and proper game development.

Do you have advice on how to advertise and run a Patreon to support the development of a VN?

I didn’t run the Patreon, but consistent updates seem to be what drives consistent engagement.

How do you choose which assets are worth making for each build, versus what’s best left for the imagination?

Cost. I try to keep things cheap. I may request a full sprite set (with variations of expression and posing) for the main cast, but will limit minor characters to just a single pose with 1-to-3 expressions. Also, I try to get a feel for what assets the person I’m working with would genuinely be interested in doing. If they seem to love drawing thick, muscular guys, I won’t feel like I’m bothering them by asking for more of what their specialty is in.

Do you think that choices are important for a VN?

No, but I still like using them. Adastra proved that significant choices and branch-route-divergence isn’t imperative to make a successful furry visual novel.

Do you plan the entire story from the very beginning, or leave it open to changing direction from chapter to chapter?

As Keith has expressed astonishment at before, Echo was written in a “by-the-seat-of-your-pants” style initially, where the direction the story went was not too scripted. However, eventually after getting a proper feel for the characters and their chemistry with one another, a lot of the plot beats that we wanted to explore clicked into place. That said, there were some radical departures. Don’t be afraid to change something that isn’t bringing you joy to write.

Does the Patreon model affect your storytelling?

I suppose in a small way. Sometimes you start writing more in an episodic style that fits more with the release schedule of various builds.

Have you ever had to abandon ideas that you previously thought were important to the story?

Yes, though it never got so bad that I had to go back and start retconning chunks of previous builds. Flynn’s ending was an example of something that I originally thought of being this action-packed, slasher movie-esque sequence that I decided against about midway through Flynn’s route. Instead I got all artsy-fartsy with it, confusing ESL speakers for years to come, according to comments I’ve received.

Where do you go for feedback on your story, and do you ever revise chapters of the story that have already been released?

I used to go to U18-chan, though that’s a quick way to ruin your evening. Now, I can check various Discord servers, Reddit, itch.io, and Patreon to see what folks are saying. It can be fun to watch people go full Game Theory on recent builds and trying to piece together what things mean, or what sort of memes spring up from folks making fun of certain elements of the writing (TV dinners, ‘Chunt’, an astonishing amount of mpreg). We definitely revised different parts of Echo over the years based on feedback, which is just part of the process. Examples include Jenna getting pissed off at Flynn for saying “faggot”, Sydney kissing the other wrestler in his fantasy, and the ultra-hot n’ steamy lovemaking scene between Chase and Leo which now just fades to black.

What’s the biggest trap you see beginners falling in, or what do you wish you had known before you started making your VN?

It’s rare to see a furry visual novel that gets completed, as many are passion projects and passion has a tendency to flicker away when the grinding realities of consistent work set in. Keeping things small at first might be for the best – like limiting the number of routes. 

Free Space / Soapbox: anything you’d like to tell people who are looking to make a visual novel that we didn’t get around to talking about.

Just do it. Seriously, if you have a unique idea in your head and you want to get other folks’ eyes on it, visual novels feel like the best medium to do so in. I know so many friends who write hundreds of pages worth of traditional novel content that gets very little attention, or try to make full-on videogames to bring their idea to life, only to spend months just trying to get a walking animation working correctly. Visual novels are the happy middle-ground, where if you have some interesting looking characters (often helped by decent art) and an enticing premise, people are going to click on your game and check it out. Writing from the heart also helps. Put your biggest fantasies, deepest fears, and most painful traumas into it. You’ll be amazed at how therapeutic it is to see strangers connect with common human experiences such as these.