What's next for Inselnova, and why

TL;DR: The mid-game is good enough for now. I spent months on it because players kept churning there, and it needed the work. But players who get past it keep asking the same thing: what next? Why am I doing this? The old browser strategy games answered that with a server reset, everyone wiped, start again. I don’t want that. So the next big thing I’m building is a real end-game: a second world you choose to sail into, with its own theme and its own rules, that gives everything you built up top a reason to exist. It’ll be in playtesting for months and it’ll change a lot. Here’s the thinking.

The mid-game is good enough for now

I’ve spent months on the mid-game. More than once I told myself I’d finally got it, and more than once I was wrong. The reason I kept going back is that players were churning right there, in the middle, after they’d already invested. That’s the worst place to lose someone. I kept adding.

Some of what it needed:

• More ways to fight than a straight raid: plunder to take resources, intercept to catch a fleet before it arrives, patrol to keep warships standing watch in your own waters.
• Balancing, punching up and punching down, so a fight is fair but you still have real agency in it.
• Quality of life for people running more than one island: moving between them, managing them without a hunt through the UI.
• A shrine, and getting the gods and their effects in properly.

Not all of it was strictly necessary. Sometimes I build a thing because I think it’s cool and I want to see it in the game. I also spent a few releases on how it feels to play: some basic sound effects, a redone bottom bar, and I finally replaced the water with something that looks a bit fresher. It’s still static, but it works fine for now.

It isn’t finished. It’s just good enough that I can stop poking at it and look at the bigger problem.

Players hit the late game and ask what next

A new player logs in and wants to know why they’re here. I’ve answered some of that, and I’m nowhere near done with it. A mid-game player is usually having a good time. Then they get close to the end of what’s there and the questions start: why? what next? why am I doing this?

In the last two weeks a few late-game players actually reached out and asked me directly. Not churning, not angry, just genuinely wanting to know what they were playing toward. I didn’t have a good answer for them. And they’re the players who stuck around, the ones I most want to keep.

The old games ended in a reset

Did the game this is descended from have an end-game? Not really. The end-game was a server reset. The world ran for a while, then everything got wiped and it started over. That was the ending.

I don’t want that. This audience remembers being wiped while offline and it’s near the top of the list of things that made them quit. A persistent world that erases itself isn’t really persistent. If you spend months building something here, the answer to what next can’t be we delete it and you do it again.

What the end-game actually is

The answer I’m building is another world. You choose to go to it. It has a different theme and slightly different rules, and it sits on the far side of the game you already know. The point of it is that you commit. You don’t bring everything back, and the choosing is most of what makes it mean something.

It’s shared, not a race to hoard. It’s the kind of thing a whole world’s players push at together rather than one person locking it down. And it’s opt-in and late, so a brand-new player never has to think about it or even know it’s there. It gives the mid-game a purpose: the fleets you built and the fights you had start pointing somewhere.

It’s early. It’ll ship into playtesting, not finished, and it’ll take months to get right. It’ll change a lot between now and then. There’s no countdown attached to it and no pressure to be online for it. That’s not what this game is.

Early concept art of the second world

Rough, early, and a lot of it will change.

Why jump to the end now

Inselnova is becoming its own game. There are hundreds of browser strategy clones turning up, and I wish them luck, but I need this to be something different, not another copy. A lot of the people playing never touched the old games it came from. They’re not here for nostalgia, they want something new to play, and this is my route to giving them that.

There’s a design reason too. The number of mechanics a game like this could have is endless, and every one of them needs a purpose or it’s just clutter. If I don’t know what the end is, I’ll keep tuning the mid-game forever and never find out what it was all leading to. So I’m jumping to the end first, then working out what leads up to it.

And if it turns out that a lot of players aren’t really fighting, that this is more of a persistent island-building world than a war, that’s fine too. I want to give people as much agency as I can and let them play it their way. Closer to an open world than a fixed track.

Even this second world isn’t the end of it. I’m leaving enough of the lore open in the game that there’s always another thread to pull. There’s no final wall, and no server reset waiting at the top.

I’m about to be away for a few weeks, so releases will space out for a bit. The work doesn’t stop, it just ships slower while I’m building the big piece. The point isn’t to get the game finished. It’s to give the people who reached the end somewhere worth going.