The audience came back 20 years older. The chaos is different now.
TL;DR: I built Inselnova because I wanted to build something. The audience that turned up is mostly returning Inselkampf players from 20 years ago, now in their 40s. They go to bed when the kids do and check in when the dog gets walked. The early game feels slower for them than the original ever did, and that’s pushing the next features in a different direction: faster early escalation, server-wide events, and a story you can only read by playing.
How it started
I built Inselnova because I wanted to build something. That was the whole brief. I copied the original Inselkampf almost beat for beat. Same loop. Build, raid, defend, queue, log out. I knew the game and I wanted to see what it would feel like with 25 years of better tooling under it.
There was one moment a few months in, playing my own game, where I thought: the pace might be a problem for a younger player. The TikTok generation expects faster. So I sped the whole thing up by 5×. Within a few days, the balance was a mess. Players told me. I kept the speed and started fixing the balance, and that work is still ongoing. I’m wiring up tooling that anchors everything to coins. Raids per hour, plunder return, build ramps. It’s a big cascading effect and I’m not done.
It wasn’t a strategic pivot. It was a “this could be a problem” thought I followed for an afternoon. The interesting thing wasn’t the speed change. It was realising I didn’t actually know who I was building this for, and the people who turned up answered that for me.
The audience that actually showed up
Most of my players are not in their 20s. They’re in their 40s. I know this because I talk to them. A lot of them joined our Discord and the private chats fill up with the same kind of line:
- “I just gotta go and put the kids to bed.”
- “Gotta go and walk the dog.”
- “Remember when [some old IK alliance] used to…”
There are some younger players. But the majority are people who played the original Inselkampf 20 years ago and came back to see what this is. They reminisce.
This isn’t data. I don’t have a survey or a birth-year field, and I should. It’s on the list. For now it’s gut feel from chats, and the pattern is consistent enough that I trust it until the numbers can either confirm it or tell me I’m wrong.
The original had chaos baked in
When I joined Inselkampf 20-odd years ago, alliances and wars were already happening. You’d land into a world that was years old. People had armies, grudges, treaties. You felt like you were entering something chaotic. Your first thought was: how do I get part of this. Your second thought was: this is going to take a long time, so I’d better build up some defence in the meantime.
That early-game energy carried you for weeks. Not because the game was fast. Because the world had momentum that you didn’t.
What that looks like in Inselnova right now
It’s not that the armies aren’t there. They are. People in Inselnova have built some seriously big armies, in some cases bigger than what you’d see at the same point in the original. The game moves faster, the bazaar helps you level up quicker, and the players who are paying attention have stockpiled accordingly.
What we have now is a mature audience playing a cold war. The armies exist. The fleets exist. The grudges, where they exist, are mostly old ones from 20 years ago. But people aren’t sprinting at each other. They’re trading, talking, watching, building. Alliances are forming around personalities, not vendettas. The map looks like a powder room, not a powder keg.
I think when this game hits 200-300 daily active users, the temperature changes. The cold war works while everyone knows everyone. Add another 200 strangers and the equations stop balancing. Until then, the older audience is happy to play it long.
The audience isn’t wrong. The world is just at peace, for now.
The spreadsheet question
The original Inselkampf was a spreadsheet game. Numbers on numbers. The interface didn’t expose much, so players built their own wikis. People wrote tools to inspect every island in the world. The community became the UI.
Inselnova hides most of that by default. I didn’t want a player to land and feel like they were reading a tax return. So I made the numbers secondary.
Then players asked for them. Not every player. The deeper ones. They wanted exact ratios, exact return on a raid, exact happiness modifiers. Fair enough. So I added a second layer of UX where the numbers show up if you want them. The default stays clean. The depth is a tap away.
I’m not sure that’s the final answer. It’s where the design currently sits. The fact that older players are asking for numbers tells me the spreadsheet instinct never left. They just don’t want it in their face anymore.
You can’t TikTok this game
This is an old school browser strategy game. There’s no 15-second hook for it. There’s no fast-cut influencer who’s going to do a build review and post it to a million followers. The pacing doesn’t fit that surface area.
That’s a constraint, not a problem. It also makes the next set of decisions clearer.
What the next features should do
I’ve been thinking about what fills the hole. Three directions.
1. Faster early-game escalation. Shorter ramp to first contact. Cheaper first attacks. Tighter starting distances. The early hours need to feel like something is at stake.
2. Server-wide events. Designer-triggered moments that force players into conflict or co-operation. Storms. Black tides. Plagues. Things that happen to the world, not just to your island.
3. Lore as the pull. This is the one I’m most interested in. The game has a story. Friends who are much better at storytelling than I am have helped me write the basics. The bet is that you advance through the game by exploring the story, and the story unfolds because you advanced. Not “read this codex.” More like: a slow paced multiplayer strategy game where the next chapter is a thing you earned.
The third one turns the slower pace into a feature. You can’t read the next part unless you played the game to get there. The pull stops being chaos. The pull becomes the world.
What I’m not sure about
I don’t know if Inselnova becomes an idle game. I never set out to build one. I was experimenting, copying old patterns, adjusting where I felt I had to. Some of what I’ve built has idle-shaped edges. Long timers. Queues that resolve while you’re away. A check-in cadence that fits around school runs and walking the dog. But it’s also social. People talk to each other in alliances. A few have said they’ve made friends. The world has a story coming.
Maybe it’s an idle game with friends and a plot. Maybe it’s something else. The shape will emerge as the audience gets bigger.
What I know is who’s playing it now. They’re not 22. They’re 42. They remember setting alarms for fleet returns and the specific feeling of logging in after work to find their island half-burned. The chaos doesn’t happen as fast for them because they’re not 22 either. They’ve got kids and dogs and jobs.
The game is changing because of who showed up. Not who I planned for, because I didn’t really plan for anyone.
Inselnova is a free browser strategy game. Play here.
