Designer Diary: Skora

Skora is my first published game. I'm the designer and the illustrator, Rose Atkinson is the developer, and Inside the Box Board Games is the publisher.

In the Beginning

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to make video games.

I quit my ad-agency graphic design job and set myself up as a freelancer. I'm a pretty risk-averse person, but I was spurred on to make the decision after working on an iPhone virtual pet with some friends. It wasn't a huge success, but it did make me realize that games were what I wanted to do.

The virtual pet had been a team affair, with us all handling game design and me specifically doing the art and UI. I tried to recreate this dynamic with my next project but struggled to find the right people. The friends I'd worked with before had moved on to other things, and after a couple of false starts, I began wondering whether it was time for me to move on, too.

Tabletop

Tabletop games were a chance to make something without needing a team (at least to begin with). I was already a keen board gamer, but I'd always seen analog design as a mysterious dark art. I got over this by telling myself that even if I made a bad game, I might still be able to demonstrate my ability as an artist. If I couldn't make my own games, maybe I could get some graphic design work in the industry.

After the burnout of my last few projects, I was keen to do something small and achievable. I wasn't set on a particular theme or mechanism, but I knew I wanted to do something with a minimalist art style. If I could get the ruleset to match this graphical simplicity, then all the better.

Simple ≠ Easy

As it turns out, making a simple game is hard. My first iterations were either too convoluted or so simplistic that they just didn't work. Through all of the muddiness of my prototypes, I started losing the vision of what I wanted my game to be. I had a vague theme of fishing, but it was uninteresting and uninspiring. Some elements were working mechanically, yet I couldn't visualize where it was going.

I started thinking about the things I liked about my current prototype. Top of the list was an area-control mechanism that rewarded all players who placed a piece in an area. I was still solo playtesting at this point, but it was the thing that I enjoyed puzzling over the most. After some contemplation, it occurred to me that I should leverage this mechanism as part of the theme. I figured a lot of area-control games are about war, so maybe mine could be about warring and fishing. The juxtaposition of those ideas excited me in a way that finally made things click.

Card sketch and final artwork

Enter the Vikings

It's not a massive leap from fishing and warring to the Vikings, and that's where I went next. I researched Viking art and found some great articles on the "Borre Style", a visual language used by the Vikings around 900 CE. It fitted with the geometric art style that I wanted to use and provided me with a great foundation for the art direction. It also brought me to a name: "Skora", the old Norse word for counting fish.

Various Prototypes

By this point, I was involved enough in the design that I wanted the game to be good. I refined my ruleset further and introduced a battling mechanism to further push the theme. I didn't want to make a confrontational game, so the "war" element was abstracted into a way to break ties.

I playtested the game at a few Playtest UK sessions. I also booked a slot at my local convention, Handycon, and it was with that event looming that I started work on the art in earnest. Development of the visual style was relatively swift. I'd had this idea in my head for so long that it pretty much fell out in one go.

Playtesting at Dragonmeet and Handycon

Pitching

After more playtesting and development, I decided to pitch my game to Inside the Box Board Games. I was pretty nervous as I'd read a few articles about publishers not wanting to see games with finished artwork.

It turns out ITB liked the art (and the idea) enough to invite me in for a playtest. After a bit more development, the game was signed in early 2019.

I learnt a lot working on Skora, but my biggest takeaway was how useful it is keeping an end product in mind. The desire to make a defined thing not only shaped my prototypes, but also gave me the constraints I needed to get Skora over the finish line.

Rory Muldoon

The finished game