End of Year 2025

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.

A new kind of RTS

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