Two Dilophosaurus go round the outside,
round the outside, round the outside.
Guess who's back, back again?
Monthly's back, tell a friend!

It's been a while! Christmas and new years happened, and with Michael's big new years post, we decided to skip the regularly scheduled Monthly, but that means that this edition is just that more meaty! So saddle up your Utah Raptor and let's dive straight in, starting with a look at a new feature!

This is a pretty big one, and some of you might have already tried it during the latest alpha or seen it on livestreams and videos, but we also wanted to show it off and highlight some of the things this new toggle allows for everyone. First, let's dig into what issues we are trying to solve and then look at the solution we came up with.

Dinolords is a genre hybrid, we are trying to mix RTS and strategy gameplay with ARPG elements, and in that, we have a main player character to whom the camera is locked and you move around with WASD. So far so good!

BUT, we also understand that this is very foreign for players coming from more traditional RTS games with a completely free camera and mouse controls.

So we have added, and are experimenting with, a feature called Wingsight (internally also affectionally known as "Bird-mode" even though it's a Dimorphodon and not a bird at all!).

Entering Wingsight, adding my ranged units to a control group and sending them across the bridge.

We believe strongly in the fantasy of playing as a character in the middle of the battlefield, and we also find the restrictions of having a following camera to afford some interesting gameplay and suspense about what is going on outside of the screen. But Wingsight serves to alleviate the players longing for more traditional RTS-style free camera, without completely negating the fantasy and gameplay we think is part of what makes DInolords great.

So how does Wingsight work? It is an alternate camera mode you can toggle in and out of via the tab-key. When you press it, the Lord sends out a Dimorphodon that flies high up into the air and the camera zooms out further than normal, giving you a larger, more top-down view than the regular view. You can then move the bird Dimorphodon around much faster than the lord is able to run, but there is a range limitation around the Lord where it slows down drastically.

Furthermore, you have additional zones around your Town Hall, and you are able to place down "Outpost" buildings, allowing you to quickly Wingsight to them and remote control production, or unit movement, even with the Lord not directly present. You can also jump quickly to these points via the minimap, offering an experience that is more akin to more traditional RTS, while keeping some of the interesting elements of the camera limitations intact.

Using Wingsight in combination with control groups adds some pretty cool levels of strategic control to the battlefield, and the ability to micromanage your units a lot more than before, while remaining a feature that can be optional, for those who would like a simpler experience.
A display of my strategic genius, letting my ranged units act as meat shields, selecting my melee control group and sending them in after the battle has ended. A true battlefield mastermind, I am!

We are still working on the specifics of Wingsight and everything mentioned is of course subject to change, but so far it feels very right for the game, and we are really looking forward to getting this in the hands of more players in future alpha tests!

You might have caught wind of this if you follow our twitter, we are working on adding seasons to our levels. For now, we have summer everywhere, and we want some more ways to really make levels stand out and look different, so in addition to our plan of adding biomes with different vegetation and appearance, we are looking to make them all work in different seasonal attire.
"Let it snooooow, let it snooooow, let it SNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!"

To start out, we are adding winter, which feels very topical as the outside temperature has been in the negative °C for weeks here in Denmark. There really is nothing like coming inside after being out in a freezing, windy January morning to plop down at your desk, warm coffee or tea ready, and load up a vista of freezing, windy, snowy landscapes!

But, I must say, it does look great, and it looks much more interesting "live", as the snow is shimmering and snowflakes are slowly falling from the skies, screenshots or gif's compressed to hecc can't show it as good as the video over on Twitter[x.com].

Starting the day I went on a vacation, we opened up for another round of playtesting, and 1000 of you got an email and installed the Alpha! First of all, we want to express our gratitude to all of you who dedicated your time to play the alpha and filled out the feedback form. It helps us out tremendously and it is so incredibly exciting to see the streams and videos that come out during the playtest, as well as reading all the messages, ideas and feedback over on the Discord. So a big Thank you to all of you.

You guys played 4814 levels and trained 155,755 units! That's almost 4 times as many units as there are people on Monaco! Wild!

Of those 155,755, almost 30,000 were dinosaurs, with the most trained being the Compsognathus with 11,995 units. A little upset there wasn't just 5 more for a clean even 12,000. But imagine twelve thousand compsognathus, and the absolute nightmarish cacophony of screeching that would cause (I promise, there's a fix to the compy screech frequency coming soon!).

You also constructed 48,417 buildings, which is a lot. It's 7 times as many as there are skyscrapers in the world. Some proper entrepreneurs you are!

And to support all that construction and training, you gathered so many resources!

• Food: 734,976

• Gold: 130,660

• Wood: 984,132

• Stone: 249,611

• Eggs: 134,767

• Amber: 1,415,652

Those are some absolutely huge numbers!

Before we wrap up this absolute unit of a Monthly, let's look at some of the new assets that are being worked on for the game. And why not start out with a unit, feels topical somewhat:

Protoceratops is really causing a rift in the team, some thing it's the ugliest thing (not the 3D model, that's gorgeous as always, but the dinosaur itself), and some of us think it's a sassy little diva that is going to live it's best life, thriving, in it's lane.

Next up is a bunch of new environment assets. Sometimes it can be easy to forget just how many things are needed to make a world feel real and "lived in". They all make the maps feel much more tangible, and it takes a lot more than just adding a tree and a bush. So here are some of the new things that has made their way into the game:

If you, like me, can't get enough of seeing all the new things that are added to the project in these art- and content showcases, our 3D wizard Jesper has started compiling some of the stuff from our weekly internal show-and-tell and putting it up on Reddit and Discord[discord.gg]! Go have a look, and we do out best to reply and interact with everyone!

That was all for this edition of Dinolords Monthly.

Thank you everyone for following along on this wild journey we are on, thank you for reading our monthly news, thank you for playing the Alpha if you did, thank you for engaging with us and for wishlisting the game. It is all very humbling to feel the overwhelming support from all of you, and we promise to do our best to make Dinolords the best game it can be!

Catch you all in the next one, and until then, happy Valentines Velociraptines Day!

-panxter

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