An Interview With Yannik, Creator of Kampfinsel

“”Yannik works. Or “yke” if you want to make me feel nostalgic – that was my handle back in the OG browsergame days.””

“”This is where I get a little sentimental. Back in my early IT career I had an instructor – one of those people who shape you without realising it – who introduced me to Inselkampf and Ogame. German browser games from the late 2000s. You’d build up an island or a planet, manage resources, raise a fleet, raid your neighbours, form alliances and talk in the chat. No real graphics, no micro-transactions, just numbers, strategy and a community of people who were way too invested. I loved them.””

“”Years later, as a grown adult with kids and a proper job, I caught myself missing that exact feeling. Kampfinsel is basically my love letter to that era – the slow-burn strategy, the alliance politics, the “just one more build queue before bed” addiction – rebuilt for people who don’t have time to be online 24/7.“”

“”First time, yes. And honestly the “big undertaking” part is exactly what nearly stopped me before I started. But here’s the thing – I didn’t sit down to make a game. I sat down to build something. First of all I wanted to play around with cloud native stuff.

Picture it: kids asleep, my wife on the couch with a book and me in full CTO-on-vacation mode with that itch you get when you’ve spent all day managing people and roadmaps and you just want to make something with your own two hands. So I started. No plan, no design doc, just “let’s see what happens.”

And then a strange thing happened. I looked up and realised I’d built an actual website that actual people could actually use. That moment is dangerous. That’s the moment you get hooked – I got completely addicted to the idea of building something other people genuinely enjoy.

I’ll be honest about the depth of my naivety, though: in the very beginning there was no email sign-up. Just a username and a password, that was it. I learned very quickly that this is a terrible idea for retention – people forget, lose access, churn and you have no way to reach them ever again. Rookie mistake number one of roughly nine hundred.

What I did do right was study. I spent hours and hours reading about game design – what drives player behaviour, which loops keep people coming back, which mechanics feel fair versus which feel like a casino. I didn’t want to just clone a game. I wanted to understand why the good ones work. I used to play a lot World of Warcraft before I switched to Kampfinsel :)””

“”Oh, where do I even begin. Buckle up, this is a rollercoaster!
First the high. I posted the game on r/zocken, a German gaming subreddit, fully expecting crickets. Instead it exploded – thousands of impressions and around 200 signups in a single day. I sat there refreshing the dashboard going “wait… it’s working. It’s actually working.”

That was the moment it stopped being a hobby in my head and became a real thing.

So I flipped straight into growth-hacking mode. Added alliances with their own chat, and that’s where the “refer a friend and they spawn on an island right next to yours” feature was born – turning your mates into both your reinforcements and your problem.

Then the lows came to collect. We had cheaters – and I mean serious cheaters, people running up to 20 multi-accounts each. In my defence, we had literally no rules at that point. None. So technically they weren’t even breaking anything. Lesson learned: write the rules before the people who need rules show up.

The worst stretch was a balancing disaster. Early on I got some game balance badly wrong and the result was real heat – frustration in-game, anger on socials, players threatening to quit if I didn’t fix XYZ immediately.

I genuinely thought, “that’s it, this is over, I’m never going to pull this off.”

And then I learned the single most valuable lesson of the whole project: the frustrated players who threatened to leave… left. And that turned out to be okay. Because what stayed were hundreds of lovely, invested, generous people who actually wanted to help shape the game. The loud minority churns; the community remains. That reframed absolutely everything for me.
At one point the questions and the genuinely valuable feedback were coming in faster than I could possibly keep up with on my own.

So I did something that doesn’t come naturally to a lot of solo builders – I just asked for help on Reddit.

And, voilà, I found really great people who jumped in. Seven weeks after release, players have organised themselves into a NATO-equivalent alliance bloc, we’ve got community events happening and people are still here building the thing with me.

The funniest “not according to plan” moment? I dropped Kampfinsel on Hacker News and – briefly – hit the front page. Huge spike, exactly the audience you dream of. Except at that precise peak moment, Google signup decided to break. So I got to watch a chunk of my best-ever traffic bounce off a broken button in real time. You laugh so you don’t cry. Big, big learning.””

“”I’m a CTO in the energy sector – tech leadership in my day job, a team, all the things that come with the role, with frequent trips to London thrown in.

And here’s what’s wild: this little island game has made me better at my actual job. There’s an enormous amount of talk on LinkedIn about what technology and AI “could” do – endless thought-leadership about the future.

It is a completely different thing to actually ship a real product that real human beings use, complain about, love, and break. Kampfinsel dragged me back into the trenches, and the lessons I’m carrying back to my day job – about velocity, about AI tooling, about how users actually behave versus how you assume they will – are worth more than a year of conference talks.””

“”Yes, absolutely. AI tooling is woven right through how I build Kampfinsel. One of my real motivations for this project was to understand modern AI development tooling in genuine depth – not the demo-day, slide-deck version, but the “what is it actually like to ship and run a production system with this stuff” version.

As a tech leader, I refuse to hold opinions about AI based on hype alone. I wanted scar tissue. So I built a real, live, multiplayer game with it – real users, real bugs, real incidents.

What I’ve learned has been hugely valuable, and a lot of it flows straight back into how I think about and lead my teams at work. That gap between “AI can theoretically do X” and “here’s what it actually takes to ship X reliably” is the most useful thing I’ve picked up.””

“”I have, and I adored it. I’ve been to Sydney – the Blue Mountains absolutely floored me, one of those landscapes that quietly recalibrates your sense of scale. And yes, Vegemite on toast: when I think back to that trip, that’s the taste that comes straight to mind. Polarising stuff, but it takes me right back.

Funny tie-in: the very first English-speaking players who ever found Kampfinsel came out of the Sydney area. (was it you by the way?) So doing this interview with an Australian blog feels weirdly fated. My wife and I used to joke when we were young that we’d move to Australia one day. So… we’ll see. 😉 “”

“”Bigger. Much bigger – but on my terms.

In five years I want Kampfinsel to be the number one name in a category that barely exists right now: the anti-lootbox game. A serious strategy game with real depth, developed hand-in-hand with its community, that respects your time and your wallet. No pay-to-win. Ever. That’s the hill I’m prepared to die on.

I genuinely believe there’s a real market for this. There’s a whole generation – people in their late 30s and 40s now – who grew up on the “nicer,” fairer games of that era, before the industry went all-in on predatory monetisation. I want to bring that feeling back, properly. This is not a one-time show for me.

To get there seriously, I’ve set myself a clear milestone: once we hit a certain number of active players, I’ll set up the game within a proper structure (company) and bring someone on to work on Kampfinsel 100% full-time. And to keep it self-sustainable, I’m exploring community-support features – emphatically not pay-to-win. More on that another time. 😉 “”

“”Just start. I’m serious – that’s the whole of it, and it’s far harder than it sounds.

The voice I had to fight hardest was the one going “nooo, don’t bother, someone’s already done it better / bigger / smarter.”

Stop right there.

That voice is a liar.

Here’s the truth: there is a completely unique way that you, specifically, see the world. Your particular life, your weird path, the things you’ve learned along the way – that is your unfair advantage. That’s the one thing nobody can copy.

For me a big part of that has been living and working across very different cultures – I’ve lived in Mumbai and Berlin, I work out of Cologne, I travel to London constantly. Every one of those places hands you a different lens on how people think and what they actually value. That’s enrichment money can’t buy, and it leaks into the product whether you mean it to or not.

So: go out there. Build something. Ask for help – loudly and early. And talk about it. Worst case, you learn something. Best case, 200 people sign up in a day.””

“”The best way is to join our Discord — that’s where the community lives and where I’m most active. Come say hi, break my game, and tell me what you’d change.””

“”Hahaha…. where do I start!

Here’s a confession: early on I quietly snuck a few of my own pet ideas onto the community feedback and voting page, just to see how they’d do.

Several of them got… zero votes. Zero! Humbling doesn’t begin to cover it.

Turns out the founder’s favourite idea and the community’s actual wants are two very different animals, and the voting page is a beautifully brutal reality check.

The most painful one: I spent days building a fancy new onboarding flow. Days. I was so proud of it. Then I A/B tested it and the numbers came back genuinely, embarrassingly bad. So I did the only sane thing – deleted the whole lot and poured that energy into making the actual game content better instead.

That failure handed me the philosophy that now guides the entire project: good depth and good content will carry the game. Not clever funnels, not growth hacks, not the thing I personally happen to think is cool. Depth and content. The players told me that with their votes and their behaviour – and I’m grateful they did.””