Chapter 1
The idea
skoobl began as a message to a friend: “this would be such a cool idea!” I was deep in a phase of playing Gartic Phone and Skribbl.io, and it was early 2025. I wanted to start as soon as possible.
skoobl
The journey
Chapter 2
Finding a partner
Moataz was the ideal person to build it with. I like the guy, he is chill, and he is creative and good at what he does. I was sure he would be down for whatever I had planned.
As I prepared everything, we both realised we were too packed to start, and the project went to the backlog.
Chapter 3
Picking it back up
It stayed there for almost a year and a half. By the time I picked it up again, we were both about to get even busier, so I told him: let’s get it through while we have the chance. He was game.
Chapter 4
Building it
We split the work. I took the game itself and Moataz designed it as he saw fit.
The backend is in Go, a given choice since I planned to host it on a $6 server and wanted something that would work well for what I assumed was a temporary showcase. The frontend is React with TanStack Router.
Moataz designed it extremely well. When the game was done I had a bunch of friends play it, and they had fun. On a roll, we got to work on two more game modes.
Chapter 5
Why it is offline
Once the new modes were done, Moataz left the project to me. He was getting busy again, and there was nothing more I really wanted to add.
I stopped paying for the server that was kept up just for this game, and it was archived. I might release it as an application for a fun local game, but for now it is a showcase.
Smoke Break