Scuttle!

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It was snowing in New York.

I'd been in the country for three days. I was extremely jetlagged, freezing cold, and ludicrously excited. I'd never been out of Australia before...I'd never seen snow before!

Everything was so new.

I was sitting in a cafe, watching the snow (pictured above) when I noticed the lady sitting next to me had insanely curly hair and was drawing spirals in her notebook. I made some kind of hilarious* joke about her drawing her own hair, and we got to chatting.

*definitely.

Her name was Kelly. As it turned out, she'd just quit her job and decided to try to make it as an artist. We got along, I started telling her about my ideas for adapting Cuttle, and she got really excited by the whole idea. We found a deck of cards, I taught her the rules (Kelly was the one I was playing with when I learned how un-fun the game is when you just spend the whole game scuttling) and when I said that I was toying with the idea of it being a Pirate game, Kelly pulled out her notepad and started sketching ideas.

Part of what I want to do with this blog is share real numbers, to give people an idea of how much art costs for board and card games. Normally you'll pay a certain amount for art, maybe half up-front and half at the successful resolution of a Kickstarter.

This was a bit of a weird exception. I offered Kelly a lump sum to do the art, but she wasn't interested in that - she wanted to invest in the game, and so instead of the amount that I offered, she asked for 20% of the Kickstarter and an ongoing profit share of the game.

I knew that to have a chance on Kickstarter, you needed to have art upfront. Fun fact: good art is expensive. What's more, she was an experienced graphic designer, and keen to take care of that as well.

Without any further ado, I accepted her offer. My game had an artist!

None of this is the normal way of doing things. Finding a great artist looking to bulk out her portfolio is a rarity, and you can't really expect them to just be sitting next to you in the first New York cafe you go to. Finding someone who will work entirely on spec is even less likely, and having them also be a talented graphic designer will basically never happen.

Once you've accomplished the impossible, however, it should be pretty smooth sailing from there.

Kelly and I sent a bunch of emails back and forth over the next year (when someone is working on spec, you can't really expect to be their number one priority) and when the art started coming in, I was gobsmacked.

I've been told that you always fall in love with your own game's art, but I genuinely think that these arts are gorgeous, while also being super fun and full of life (and each one's different, which is important for a card game). Just perfect for the light, piratey game we were working on.

It was in one of these emails that I told her the name I'd been thinking of - 21 Doubloons. On-theme, clear, fun, early in the alphabet (which obviously isn't vital but it's always nice to be at the top of lists). What's more, putting it in the title meant that no one would ever forget what the goal of the game was: to get to 21 Doubloons.

A few months later, Kelly sent me an email: she'd done what I really should have done in the first place, and googled the name (do as I say, not as I did!). Turns out http://dozendoubloons.com/ is already a game, and had been since over a year before I'd started putting 21 Doubloons together. Whoops!

(I loved the name 21 Doubloons, but "Dozen Doubloons" is even better. Dang it! Always google before deciding on a name!)

While the gameplay was very different, their game was targeting the same audience as mine and so I went back to the drawing board. After a bit of brainstorming with Kelly, I decided to go with (and this may take you by surprise) Scuttle! - it's short, it's cute, and part of the reason I wanted to make this game was because of my love for the original, Cuttle - my hope in choosing that name was that anyone else with fond memories of that simple little game will check it out.

Kelly wanted to add some kind of tagline to it, to give it a more piratey feel. After a day of scouring over old pirate quotes, we settled on "Take what you can - give nothing back!" - an old nautical phrase, used in The Curse of the Black Pearl as a toast.

I had gorgeous arts, and a fun two-player game.

But, just like all Slytherins, I wanted more.

When we were putting the cards together, I had made sure that they were all worded to work for more than two players. My target audience for this game was families - part of the Jellybean Game design ethos is "Games that parents can play with their kids, or with each other once the kids have gone to bed."

Two-player was fun, but I wanted to extend it to 3, 4, or even 5 players. And after reading how much of a difference adding a solo variant can make, I decided that Scuttle! was going to go to Kickstarter with a strong single-player mode.

More on that next time!

Up next: Scuttle! Design Diary - Part 4 - Single and Multi-Player

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