Get people in, read the data, change one thing, repeat. The loop behind five onboarding rebuilds.
I'd never built a game, so I started with a loop, not a plan. Five onboarding rebuilds, each one a data-driven experiment rather than a step on a roadmap.
My best players don't fade out, they vanish. Three months of data from my browser strategy game.
Three months of live data on the players who quit my browser strategy game mid-game. The most invested ones don't fade out, they stop all at once.
I can't tell if my browser strategy game is finished. I don't have enough players to know.
Why I've been shipping features into my multiplayer browser strategy game out of fear, what my retention numbers do and don't tell me, and why the game doesn't know what it is yet.
Browser games are easy to build now. The hard part is deciding what they should be.
There's talk of an indie golden age. The barrier to making an old-school browser strategy game has fallen away, so they're everywhere. That was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding what to build.
Old-school browser games are coming back. They're not clones, it's a genre.
A wave of new browser games look like the old ones, and people call them clones. It's a genre, the same way Minecraft clones became survival-crafting.
I sped my strategy game up to respect players' time. It backfired.
I sped up my browser strategy game to ask less of players. The survey said I'd done the opposite. Faster meant more check-ins, not fewer.
I built a strategy game you can fight your coworkers in, a few minutes a day
Most strategy games want your whole evening. Inselnova wants about five minutes, twice a day, in your browser. The fun part is getting a few coworkers in, so there's a quiet war running under the workday.
The first five minutes of my game, rebuilt five times
The early game is the gate to everything else, and too many new players weren't getting through it. Here's what five rebuilds of the first session in my browser strategy game taught me about where people stall and what actually keeps them.
From 0 to 8 Daily Players: Finding Early Adopters for a Niche Browser Game
Found 8 daily active players by messaging old Inselkampf fans on Reddit directly, then refined onboarding with achievements and psychology tricks. 330 site visitors, 41 signups, 8 completing the first achievement set.
