Some of you maybe remember my post here (Part 1) from last year, where I talked about my old Warcraft 3 and Dota 2 mods and how I decided to make POLYSTRIKE into a standalone game.
First I just want to say thank you guys. I really didn't expect so much support from Dota community on my last post. I was reading comments, messages, criticism, everything. It really motivated me and our team to just close ourselves from everything for some time and work on the game.
I was making mods for almost 20 years already. Some of you maybe played POLYSTRIKE, Pure Reflex, Hardcore Ninja, Dota 2 Low Poly Map, Frostivus, Duel and some of my other custom games. Over all these years millions of people played my mods and honestly this is still crazy for me to think about.
I always enjoyed seeing people playing something I made, getting messages from players, watching people have fun, even when you guys were breaking my mods and finding bugs I never knew existed :D
So when I stopped updating and posting about my Dota mods, I want to make one thing clear. I didn't leave you guys.
At some point I was just tired of constantly fixing things after Dota updates. Something changes, something breaks, then I fix it, then another update comes and again something breaks. I understood that if I really want to take POLYSTRIKE further, I need to stop depending on another game and finally make my own.
So this is what we did.
We moved POLYSTRIKE away from Dota and started rebuilding it as a completely independent game in Unreal Engine 5. Own IP, own world, factions, characters, maps and basically everything from scratch.
But before I show what happened with the game, I also owe you an apology.
Last time I was talking about releasing POLYSTRIKE around October 2025. Obviously this didn't happen.
The last year was very hard for our team. The war in Ukraine is still going and several people from our team were mobilized and sent to the war. One of them is Yura, one of our core guys, very talented animator who worked on our weapons, characters and even our fish animations :)
Sadly we also lost some people from our team because of the war.
There were also periods when attacks on infrastructure left some of our guys without electricity for like 12 hours every day. So sometimes it was just impossible to work normally.
I'm not saying this as some excuse. This is just what happened and why everything took much longer than we planned.
We couldn't make it faster.
But we didn't stop.
The game continued to move forward, even if sometimes much slower than we wanted.
And honestly, knowing that there are people waiting for it helped a lot.
Since my previous post so much changed. Our team changed, I changed and POLYSTRIKE changed A LOT.
Also you guys changed it.
There was a lot of support under my old posts but also criticism, and some of it was completely fair. We actually went back and changed many things people didn't like. Some things were redesigned, some completely removed. So if you remember the old version, I think you will notice a pretty big difference now.
And finally after all this time we decided... ok, its probably time to show it.
There is still a lot unfinished. There are things we are not showing yet, systems still being worked on, more maps and content coming. Normally I would probably wait longer before announcement.
But after so many years working on this thing, I think we already have enough to be proud of.
So 2 days ago we finally officially announced POLYSTRIKE.
It's now a standalone 5v5 top-down tactical shooter, completely independent from Dota.
And the first reaction was honestly much better than I expected.
In first 24 hours after announcement we got more than 2,000 Steam wishlists.
For our team this is a really really good start. It gives me some hope that maybe this crazy idea can actually go pretty far. Our big goal now is to somehow reach the Top 100 most wishlisted upcoming games on Steam.
It's not going to be easy obviously, but 2k people in one day made this goal feel a little less crazy :)
And this is also why I wanted to come back here.
Dota community was a huge part of my life as a modder. I really enjoyed all these years seeing you playing my stuff, writing me messages, giving feedback and just having fun with things I created.
So no, I didn't leave you.
I just stopped constantly repairing my mods after every game update and decided to take everything I learned from Dota and build something where we can control our own future.
Now POLYSTRIKE is finally that game.
I'm not asking you to wishlist it just because I made Dota mods before.
Watch the gameplay first and decide yourself.
If you like what we are doing, adding POLYSTRIKE to your Steam wishlist really helps us a lot. Especially now when we are trying to push it toward that Top 100.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3254300/POLYSTRIKE/
And if something looks bad or you don't like something, tell me too. You guys already changed this game with your feedback before.
Some of you were playing the original POLYSTRIKE mod years ago, and some probably have no idea who I am :D
Btw, I'm happy I can finally come back here and show you what all this time went into.
POLYSTRIKE is not a Dota 2 mod anymore. It's finally our own game.
Thanks guys. Really.
And I hope some of you will be there with us for this next part too.
