A New Skill

Setup

Make sure you've made all the accounts necessary. If you haven't, go back to the Setup section and follow all of the steps.

Adding a New Skill

Navigate to developer.amazon.com and sign into your account. Hover over the Alexa tab and select the Alexa Skills Kit. Click Create Skill on the right.

Now we need to fill in a few fields to identify our skill.

Skill Name is the name shown in the skills store. It can be anything you want.
Skill Model is the basic model that contains intents and utterances that you use in your skill. There's a few predefined ones, but we will choose Custom, which allows us to define our own model. Hit Create Skill at the top to continue.
Backend Resource is how you'll be providing the backend for your skill. We'll be Provisioning our own backend resources.
Template are types of custom skills that you can choose from. While these look fun, we'll just be using the Start from Scratch template. Click Choose at the top right to continue.

You'll be taken to the Skills Developer landing page for your skill. We'll go through the Skill Builder Checklist now. You can also see this checklist in the left menu.

We'll do the easiest step first: the Invocation Name. This is what name we use when we talk to Alexa. For example, if our invocation name is "echomon", we would say, "Ask echomon to ____". It automatically fills this item in using your Skill Name, but you can choose whatever you like.

Some requirements on the Invocation Name: it can only contain lower case letters, spaces, apostrophes, and periods.

Hit Save Model at the top, then select Intents in the left menu. Or, from the Skills Builder Checklist on the Landing Page, click on the Intents, Samples, and Slots item in the checklist to take you straight to the intent creation page.