Hello everyone,
Michael here. I’m the CEO of Northplay and Game Director on Dinolords. Frederik/panxter usually writes our Steam updates and he is a much wittier writer than me, but most of the team is taking a well deserved holiday after an eventful year. This, however, gives me an excellent opportunity to share a small end-of-year update from me personally.
I’m used to talking about the ‘We’ in Northplay as a company. But I wanted to take a moment to thank you for enabling me, Michael, to work on this game. If it wasn’t for your support I wouldn’t be able to build this amazing team and work on this absolute dream project. Your wishlists, comments, feedback, and words of encouragement make this journey possible.
At Gamescom earlier this year.
I have been making games since I was a kid growing up in the 90s. And while a good part of my career has been dedicated to graphic design, I always gravitated towards games. I made an imaginary game company when I was 10. Most people probably think that studio CEOs are these businessy types, but I’m really just a graphic designer. Or at least I started as one, and have had to learn all the other stuff along the way.
Northplay is turning ten in May and it’s been ten long years building a studio the hard way. We have worked on more than 20 games across mobile, console and PC. Some of our own games have done reasonably well. Some failed horribly. When we weren’t making games for ourselves, we made them for others to help fund our next experiments.
In comparison, these past 3 years working on Dinolords have been a surreal experience. It’s been challenging but in very different ways. We now have financial support to focus all of our efforts on one game. We’ve had to grow the team and organise our work in new ways. We’ve fought battles and elbowed our way into places to give ourselves the best possible shot at making this game.
Some of the Northplay team on a company trip this year.
And Dinolords is no ordinary game. I know most people probably feel that way about their projects, but I have made ordinary games and this isn’t one. We’re attempting a genre hybrid that is mostly unexplored. A player-controlled hack-and-slash protagonist in a real-time strategy setting with base building and unit control. Or Hack’n’Strat as Frederik much more succinctly coined it.
We’ve spent this past year working through what that really means and how you make one. It’s been fraught with dead ends and hypotheses we’ve had to prove or disprove.
Making something new is hard. Explaining it clearly to players is often even harder.
I fully expect some people to pick up our game and be disappointed that it isn’t simply Age of Empires with dinosaurs. I’m sorry if reading this disappoints you. But that’s not the game we wanted to make.
I love RTS. Like many of you I grew up playing this genre of video games. I still enjoy them regularly. But I also feel like we’ve been remaking the same games for the past 20 years, rarely reaching the heights of the great titles from the late 90s. Strategy games have splintered into many sub-genres, but by and large RTS have stayed mostly the same.
We want to add something, not because we dislike what is, but because we think it can do more.
And that vision is much sharper here at the end of 2025 than it has ever been.
The aftermath of a Dinolords brainstorm session.
We’re putting players into the action as the main protagonist in a real-time strategy game. We’re bringing WASD to RTS.
You’ll balance your attention between building up your castle, defending it, exploring the land and raiding your opponent. All through the perspective of controlling the lord and commanding your army from a fixed camera. To long-time RTS veterans, this will feel foreign at first. But we’re confident that there’s a game here that deserves your attention.
We’ve found this formula makes some meaningful trade-offs compared to more traditional RTS games:
Playing a character in the world embodies what was always the most important resource in any strategy game: the player’s attention. It anchors much of the abstraction and takes away the competitive requirements of high actions-per-minute gameplay.
Because the camera almost always follows the lord, Dinolords have a spatial continuity that creates much stronger player narratives. It also makes the game streamer-friendly.
Most RTS games resolve in who-has-the-biggest army, but in Dinolords your character is a real force to be reckoned with and how you play on the battlefield can turn the tide of any encounter. Manoeuvring, dodging, and using abilities borrow everything that makes action RPGs so much fun. The player can express skill and win against overwhelming forces in battles that feel much more immersive than watching two blobs of units go up against each other.
We’ve tried to find all the places where Action RPG and RTS have synergies and amplified those to create fun and engaging systems. Dinolords also feature mechanics and metaprogression that’s inspired by modern roguelikes.
If we succeed in bringing in even some of these ideas to the genre, my hope is that it’ll open up a new type of game. One that still scratches that real-time strategy itch, but in a way that feels fresh, approachable and above all, fun.
Wrangling a production schedule at Düsseldorf Airport on our way back from Gamescom.
This year was also the year our dinosaur game got a hell of a lot more dinosaurs.
Through all of our experiments, it’s been clear that dinosaurs in medieval times are the energy that carry this whole venture. As long as there’s dinosaurs on screen, most other faults are easily forgiven. At least, that’s been our experience.
At our office we have a giant poster with our key-art and when we’re in doubt about some design decision, we often point to it, to remind us how we want the player to feel when playing our game.
This past year, we more than doubled the amount of dinosaurs in the game and introduced a whole slew of dinosaur-powered upgraded buildings for players to unlock. From the Triceratops uprooting trees in your lumber camp to the Atrociraptor helping you hunt rabbits. Systems around these have solidified, and we now have a clear understanding of where we want to go.
As the year is coming to a close, I look back at another 12 months of working with some amazing humans on a childhood dream project.
2025 has been the year where we truly figured out what a Hack’n’Strat game should look like. We crossed 100,000 wishlists and got on the cover of PC Gamer(!) We’ve run three playtests with an increasing number of players and already received a huge amount of valuable feedback. We did a little video to celebrate some of these milestones.
We still have a lot of work ahead of us and next year is going to be a make or break moment for both our game and ultimately my company. We are taking a chance here, but it’s a chance that I’m proud to be taking. If you’ve been following along, playtesting, commenting, or just quietly wishlisting from the sidelines, thank you. You’re the reason we get to take these risks at all.
We’ll be back in the new year with more updates. Until then, take care of yourselves, and enjoy the holidays.
Sincerely,
Michael