Browser games are easy to build now. The hard part is deciding what they should be.
TL;DR: There’s a lot of talk about an indie golden age. I’m not really a gamer, so I won’t pretend to have a strong opinion on it. But it sent me down a line of thinking. The barrier to making an old-school browser strategy game has basically fallen away, so they’re everywhere now. That was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding what to build, and that’s the part I’m working on now.
I’m not a modern gamer
I should be upfront. I don’t really follow games anymore. Not the indie scene, not AAA. I’m not the audience for most of what gets written about gaming now.
The ones that stuck with me are old. Settlers on the Amiga. Red Alert and the Command and Conquer crowd around it. Team Fortress Classic. And Inselkampf, the browser game Inselnova grew out of. Strategy, mostly, with a shooter thrown in.
So when people like Chris Zukowski write that games are in an indie golden age, I read it as an outsider. He’s the expert here, not me. From what I can see his knowledge sits around Steam, probably because that’s where he’s watched it work, for him and for the developers he studies. Idle games, the co-op horror ones, shop sims. Not really browser games. So I’m only borrowing the shape of his argument, that small simple games are winning again, because it rhymes with the corner I’m sat in.
Why these are easy to build now
Here’s the part that actually got me thinking. If you want to make a game, you pick a platform. Unity, Godot, Unreal. Go or C++ if you want to get closer to the metal, maybe your own engine. Each one is a commitment.
Then there’s HTML and JavaScript. A game that runs in a tab. And it turns out that’s the sweet spot for building with AI right now. The libraries are open source, GitHub is full of this exact kind of code, and the models have read all of it. Ask for a build queue, a tick loop, a combat resolver, and it knows the shape before you finish the sentence.
So these games are easy to make now. They’re mostly numbers, timers and resources. Spreadsheets with a map on top. That’s not an insult, it’s why a new Travian-like shows up every day or two. Making one isn’t the achievement it used to be.
The hard part is deciding what to build
If anyone can build one, building one means nothing. The whole game is in what you decide it should be. That’s the part I’m working through now. This has been a few months around a day job, not three years of my life, so I’d rather take the time and get the direction right.
I’ve had a few people play Inselnova and tell me, in so many words, “I can see where this is going, I like it, but it’s not for me. I preferred the old way.” That’s happened more than once now, and it nags at me. Do I chase the person who wants the exact original feeling, or the more casual player who wants something lighter?
Here’s my problem with the first one. Rebuilding 2005 bores me. It isn’t creative, and you can’t win it anyway. You’re competing with someone’s memory of a game they loved twenty years ago, and the memory always wins.
Old-school is the door, not the destination
So this is where I’ve landed, at least for now.
The old-school feel is the door. It’s what makes someone open the game and go “I used to love games like this.” You need that, it’s how the right people recognise what they’re looking at. But it’s the door, not the room. If the whole game is just the door, there’s no reason to stay, and no reason for it to exist next to the original.
The room is the part that interests me. I keep coming back to mixing two genres together, something these games don’t usually do, and something Inselnova doesn’t do yet. The building thread from Settlers, where the pull is shaping your own place, not just fighting over the map. I want version one solid first, then I want to push on that.
And honestly that’s the only real edge I’ve got over the clone-a-day crowd. They’re rebuilding the past. I’m trying to take it somewhere. The fact that copying the original bores me might be the most useful instinct I have.
Where it’s going
For now I’m finishing the core. Closing out features, fixing bugs, getting it stable enough that it doesn’t feel like a demo. That matters more than chasing platforms.
After that, the bigger target is desktop, and through that, Steam, because that’s where the audience actually is. Mobile is tempting but it’s drowned out by everything else in the stores, and the App Store is its own battle, so I’m holding off until the game is stable.
And I still have to work out how a game like this even reaches people. I know SaaS marketing and SEO. I’m not sure either is how these games get big. SEO might trickle some traffic in, but this isn’t a SaaS product, it’s a different beast, and learning what actually moves the needle is the next thing on my list.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. I started out reading about a golden age and ended up circling the only question that matters once the building gets easy. Not can I make it. What should it be.
Inselnova is a free browser strategy game, built in the spirit of the old ones. Play here.
