Inselnova — The Governor's Chronicle

The first batch of quality of life fixes: a simpler Market, clearer Workshop crafting, a page for every alliance and @mentions in chat.

Seven months from release: direct messages, Reddit, a Discord spike, then comparison pages.

The Risen come through when the Black Tide's Lumen hoard climbs too high.

Every new player gets a feedback message an hour after joining. 17.5% reply, active players far more.

Inselnova shows you the game state on the map, patrols, fires, wealth, instead of printing it.

Week bulletin from Founders World: the conflict board now reads All Governors versus The Black Tide (4,874 to 2,587, war clock 7h).

Seat a steward on a Dominion island: one officer for life who takes it past level 20 and rises from Reeve to High Steward.

Every marketing push brings a wave of vocal players who help build the game, then rotate out around mid-game.

I started a second game from an empty folder to see if the way I build Inselnova still works without Inselnova's harness.

Slack isn't dying, and I still think ChatGPT replaces it.

Founders World week in review: roxx drives fifteen recorded strikes into The Black Tide without a man missing, Windy Walrus and Flowkap add fresh damage on Tide coasts, and Miko Misan receives another battle slip that refuses to declare its result.

A quality of life pass across the daily game: the island you look at every session, the reports you read, and the chores in between.

How Inselnova runs a persistent world on one 1-second loop and computes resources on read instead of writing them to the database on a timer.

Founders World, week in review: roxx and Flowkap keep steady pressure on The Black Tide across Small Island, Medium Island, and the Tide's named pockets, while one entry at Black Tide Grime refuses to close.

One fleet no longer clears a Tide island.

A retrospective on building a deep multiplayer browser strategy game with AI, from a web developer who had never finished a game, and what it taught me.

Founders World, week in review: Flowkap forces the Black Tide off Small Island and Medium Island, roxx keeps pressure on BigChris while also striking BartigeBert and BOBYDOG, and Noob Nation scouts and plunders the gold-named coasts as Ocean 9:5 rejects T…

Your yards will break up ships and war engines for a quarter of their materials back, siege cost is flat again, and a long list of fixes.

Inselnova has eight fixed avatars and the next version needs far more faces than that.

Six months and just over a thousand governors into Inselnova, a browser strategy game: who actually stayed, how search quietly became a steady source of players while I wasn't marketing, and the three-stage plan from here.

Founders World, week in review: patrol boats kept failing to return, an unknown raider kept its name line perfectly empty, and the Harbor Board answered with counting, recounting, and more liberated Black Tide shores than anyone cares to initial. roxx and…

Founders World week in review: Flowkap and Aye-for-an-Aye struck Medium Island against the Black Tide, each returning with a blackened idol as other Tide shores were recorded as liberated, some without a name. roxx ran a long, tidy raid-circuit through Bi…

Send fleets from several islands at one target so they land together, then commit yours to an alliance strike that sails on an officer's order.

Founders World, week in review: roxx drives clean raids through BigChris' dormant outer islands, then orders an independent audit at SplashFish Nook.

Set a shipment between two islands once and a crew loops it for you.

After a year of AI-assisted development, I've lost the thing I was proudest of: being able to debug my own code in my head.

Most people run AI one agent at a time, which wastes their time.

Saturday review for Founders World: Black Tide-held ground was cleared again at Medium Island as Flowkap and Aye-for-an-Aye each forced a victory and brought home the same curious spoil.

Capture or liberate any rival colony regardless of login, survive punching up, and watch the sea come alive.

I build Inselnova test-first: ask AI for a failing test, then let it code until green.

After months on the mid-game, players who reach the late game keep asking what they're playing toward.

Claim a stretch of open ocean and let its residents vote it yours, raise motions in the new Alliance Council, and feel a rebalanced plunder game.

A tour of the Claude Code skills I use to build a browser strategy game, in the order I actually run them: scope a ticket, balance the economy, check the cascade, write a failing test, ship the version.

How to write and chain AI coding skills so a coding agent works your way: less typing, fewer bugs, and repeatable results instead of guesswork.

How a project shifts from feature factory to steady, tested releases once real users arrive, shown in a browser strategy game with real numbers.

Raise a Call for Aid and your alliance sails to defend you.

Three new ways to fight at sea: raise a patrol to guard your waters, blockade enemy convoys, and read raiders off your Watch Tower.

I ask AI to investigate my game's database instead of building dashboards.

I'd never built a game, so I started with a loop, not a plan.

A new stealth Plunder raid that slips into enemy harbours, plus alliances that earn XP from quests, raids, and just showing up.

Three months of live data on the players who quit my browser strategy game mid-game.

Your harbour now caps how many ships an island can hold, plundering counts double, and Tideline Finds wash ashore as a sealed sea-crate.

Codex writes better code, but after months running both I moved everything back to Claude Code.

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.

Dread Lord ran the longest win streak the Founders Archipelago has recorded, forty-five straight, then stopped coming to the water and, by his own word, retired undefeated.

There's talk of an indie golden age.

My AI loop workflow finds, fixes, and proves bugs in my own systems.

Let an island's food stores hit empty and the garrison starts to die, Colony rank and up, and blessings now count when the fleet lands.

A wave of new browser games look like the old ones, and people call them clones.

I built an AI marketing mentor by priming three chatbots and letting Claude Code distil the output into a reusable skill.