A thousand governors in, here's who stayed and where Inselnova goes next
TL;DR: I took a few weeks off and players kept arriving without me. Just over a thousand people have now created a governor in Inselnova. Nearly all of them played at least once, about a quarter came back for a second day, and a small core has been at it for months. Search kept new players coming through the months I wasn’t marketing, and ChatGPT has started sending a few too. Here’s the state of things after six months, and the plan from here.
I’ve been away for most of the last few weeks. I pushed out a few small releases, bug fixes mostly, but no marketing, no onboarding work, no real push to bring people in. I came back expecting it to be quiet, and it wasn’t. People had kept signing up and playing the whole time, which is the first time that’s happened without me pushing.
It seemed worth stopping to count properly. Not the daily numbers I usually watch, but the whole six months since the first governor landed in February.
A thousand governors, and the ones who stayed
Just over a thousand people have made a governor. That’s the milestone I didn’t quite notice passing while I was off. The number I care about more is what happened next, because signing up is easy and staying is the hard part.
Here’s the funnel:
| What they did | How many |
|---|---|
| Created a governor | 1,051 |
| Actually played (at least one session) | 987 |
| Came back for a second day | 275 |
| Stuck around as active players | 112 |
Of the 987 who played, 712 showed up for one day and never came back. About a quarter returned, and one player has logged in on 149 different days, close to every day since near launch.
That first-day drop-off is the number I’m working on, and there’s plenty more to do on it. The shape underneath is encouraging though: a lot try it, a quarter stick past the first session, and a stubborn few have made it part of their week for months. That core is what I’m building for.
Search kept players coming while I wasn’t marketing
Reddit is still a great source of players. When I post in the right places, it brings a wave over the first two or three days, and a lot of them still arrive that way.
Search is the part that grew on its own. In March the game barely showed up in Google, a new site takes time to get indexed and ranked, so it pulled 14 clicks the whole month. There’s a spike in April, but that’s mostly people who saw the game on Reddit and then googled the name, the push showing up in search. The real shift came after. With no marketing at all, Google clicks went from 145 in May to 286 in June to 414 in July, the site ranking on its own.
So when I stopped posting, the visits didn’t dry up the way they used to. Search quietly filled the quiet months.
The newer thing is AI. My analytics logs a few dozen visits a month from ChatGPT and Copilot, but I don’t think that’s the real number. The referrer often doesn’t survive the jump out of the ChatGPT app, so a lot of it lands as plain direct traffic instead. What I do have is players telling me straight out. In the last week a few have said, without me asking, that ChatGPT pointed them here when they asked it for a free strategy game with no pay-to-win. That’s new, and it’s not the kind of thing I can buy.
I run marketing pushes when there’s a real milestone, usually a rebuilt onboarding. I haven’t touched onboarding in a month, so there’s been no push. Players kept arriving anyway.
Lots of new alliances, none of them big
One small tweak last release made more alliances form, which I was pleased about until I looked closer. There are 16 alliances right now. The biggest has 8 members. Nine of them are one or two people.
The lever worked, more people started alliances, but nothing consolidated into a proper power on the map. Lots of tiny flags, no big ones. Getting people into a real alliance is one of the strongest things I can do for how long they stay, so this is near the top of the list.
It started as an Inselkampf clone. It isn’t really one now
Inselnova began as a clone of Inselkampf. Six months of adding things has moved it a good distance from where it started. Off the top of my head, what’s gone in that the old game never had:
- Proper graphics instead of static tiles
- A shrine and gods you can call on
- Expeditions
- A workshop where you craft goods
- A research tree
- Council affairs
- A lot more lore and story
None of that was in the original. It’s still recognisably the same kind of game, slow, persistent, played in short check-ins. But it’s its own thing now, and the roadmap is about pushing that further rather than staying in the clone’s shadow.
Where it goes next
I think about the game in three stages, and everything so far is still stage one. We’re on v0.103 as I write this, so it’s all still 0.x. That’s more than a hundred releases already, and most of the big ones shipped with at least one new feature.
V1, game: prove people want to play it
Right now I’m getting the game to a stable version one, not a finished one. The next few weeks are quality of life and bug fixes, and the end game is already in development alongside that. I came back to a stack of reports from players, all logged, none of them game-breaking, mostly small annoyances I’ll clear this week.
Two of those changes are bigger than annoyances. The first is auto-shuttering: the game turns away and eventually reclaims islands that go quiet, and a few of you have said it does it too hard. It does, so I’m reviewing it. I still want worlds to feel fresh rather than fill up with dead islands, so it’s a rebalance, not a switch I’m flipping off. The second is the Black Tide, the force that raids and reclaims islands after players stop playing. Right now it does a job. I want it to feel less like a system and more like a player: smarter, more inventive, doing things you didn’t see coming. It also matters well beyond cleanup. The Black Tide holds the keys to the end game, so getting it right now sets up everything that comes later.
The goal for this stage is simple: enough to do for around 90 days, ending in a real endgame. I’ve still got well over a hundred things in the backlog before I’d call it properly done, so it’s months of work, not weeks.
V2, depth: give them reasons to keep playing for months
After that the game goes both deeper and wider. Islands stop being identical. Each gets a steward, a specialisation, a reason to matter on its own instead of being another copy of the last one. More lore, more events, more things going wrong in interesting ways, and a proper desktop experience for people running ten or twenty islands.
The possibilities here are endless, and that’s what keeps it fun to build. I tend to work backwards from the story. I figure out the lore first, the reason a thing exists in the world, and then decide what mechanics are needed to drive the game there. That order is what makes it strategic rather than a pile of features. I’ve got a long backlog, but I don’t add things just because I can. Something shouldn’t exist just to exist. It goes in when I can weave it into the story and give it a reason to be there.
V3, market: finish the product and take it to Steam
The last stage is where it’s finished enough to put in front of a much bigger audience, Steam included. That’s a long way off, but it’s where all of this is headed.
On PvP, and the players deciding
The player-versus-player side isn’t the centre of the game yet. The mechanics are there, raiding, spying, fleets, alliance war, but a world needs enough people in it before war becomes the thing driving the story. For now it’s mostly players building and progressing, with the conflict there for when the population supports it. The players decide when that tips, not me.
That’s where things stand at six months. A thousand people have tried it, a quarter came back, a small core has stayed for the long haul, and the game is finding players on its own for the first time. Plenty still broken, plenty still to build. If you play and something confuses you or breaks, tell me. The best changes I’ve made all started as someone reporting a thing that annoyed them.
