Laysara: Summit Kingdom
The devs play the Next Fest Demo!
We'll be playing through the Next Fest demo again!
In Laysara: Summit Kingdom, you must build and expand your very own settlements in the high mountains! Carefully plan production chains and satisfy various needs of your three-caste society while dealing with mountain hazards such as weather breakdowns and avalanches. Are you skilled enough to make your town thrive?
If you're keen to see some of your other favourite creators playing the Laysara demo, check them out here:
Real Civil Engineer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbfejUocdvc&t=1
Splattercat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc-GCzbTiAk&t=12
Raptor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwixhRkYZVU
If you're generally keen on chatting Laysara with us, our Discord is the best place to do it!
Cheers!
Maciek & the Quite OK Games team
Watch the devs play!
We'll be playing through the Next Fest demo again!
In Laysara: Summit Kingdom, you must build and expand your very own settlements in the high mountains! Carefully plan production chains and satisfy various needs of your three-caste society while dealing with mountain hazards such as weather breakdowns and avalanches. Are you skilled enough to make your town thrive?
If you're keen to see some of your other favourite creators playing the Laysara demo, check them out here:
Real Civil Engineer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbfejUocdvc&t=1
Splattercat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc-GCzbTiAk&t=12
Raptor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwixhRkYZVU
If you're generally keen on chatting Laysara with us, our Discord is the best place to do it!
Cheers!
Maciek & the Quite OK Games team
The devs play the Next Fest Demo!
Today (Tuesday 20th June) at 8am PT / 5pm CET, we'll be playing the Next Fest demo and chatting about all things Laysara! Swing by and say hi!
In Laysara: Summit Kingdom, you must build and expand your very own settlements in the high mountains! Carefully plan production chains and satisfy various needs of your three-caste society while dealing with mountain hazards such as weather breakdowns and avalanches. Are you skilled enough to make your town thrive?
If you're keen to see some of your other favourite creators playing the Laysara demo, check them out here:
Real Civil Engineer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbfejUocdvc&t=1
Splattercat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc-GCzbTiAk&t=12
Raptor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwixhRkYZVU
If you're generally keen on chatting Laysara with us, our Discord is the best place to do it!
Cheers!
Maciek & the Quite OK Games team
Laysara in Steam Next Fest - FAQ about the demo
It’s been over a month since we put out our demo here on Steam. The reception has been great so far: It has already been played by 30,000 Steam players, many YouTubers and streamers, and we have gathered a lot of great and very useful feedback. Thank you very much!
If you didn’t have a chance to check out the demo just yet, now is the perfect opportunity, as Laysara is taking part in Steam Next Fest! We’re excited to participate in such a great event with many wonderful demos from skilled developers all around the world.
We feel like this is a good occasion to answer a few most frequent questions about our demo (and Laysara in general).
Why can't I rotate buildings?
Long story short: implementing this feature would take us months of work and we cannot afford it.
But how come, isn’t this an absolute standard in modern city-builders, even those developed by small indie teams? That’s true, but this is where one of the most distinctive features of Laysara comes into play: mountains and terrain. Unlike in other city-builders, building 3D models in our game have to be adjusted for the 30-degree angled slopes you are building on. This means our models have many features like terraces, platforms, foundations and level changes that only make sense if the building is facing downwards.
Implementing building rotation would require us to make additional versions of the 3D models, rotated by 90 degrees. Even if we’re talking about only rectangular buildings (which are the majority) this isn’t something we can pull off, unfortunately, as the whole graphics for Laysara is being made by a single person.
We know this can be seen as an excuse, because, well, it is - but we’d rather openly tell you how things stand than try to justify this by saying “it’s a conscious design choice!” or other made-up reasoning. Also, when you accept this limitation and include it in your town-planning process, it isn’t really that much of an impediment - but obviously, this is our opinion, you’ll be the final judge of that! :)
Isn’t the gameplay a little shallow without money mechanics?
Money mechanics are turned off for the demo only. Monitoring your treasury and managing the town’s income and expenses is a very important part of the game: if you run into money problems you can’t resolve in time - game over, you have lost.
The core of the game is resource management, including production, processing and transportation, as well as taking care of your population by fulfilling various needs of your citizens - and this is what the demo is focusing on. Nonetheless, taking care of your money balance is an important piece of the puzzle called Laysara: Summit Kingdom and will be there for the Early Access release :)
I’ve played the demo, did I see all the game has to offer?
Certainly not! You know the ground rules, but you haven’t played with many toys just yet. To name a few: the third caste (Monks), upgrading roads and carriers for more efficient resource transportation, building a monumental Summit Temple on the very peak - all of it on different mountains varying in shapes and sizes, vegetation zone layouts, resource availability and weather conditions.
Speaking of weather, the demo only touches on the topic of snow accumulation and avalanches, which are a very important part of the game: there will be a few tools at your disposal to mitigate the avalanche danger and create a reliable snow-protection strategy, but as you saw during the demo, the consequences of getting it wrong may be dire. If you are interested in this topic, you can take a look at one of our previous posts about the avalanches specifically: link
Why the demo isn’t available in my language, which should be supported according to the Steam page?
The demo is available only in English because the game is still under heavy development, the user interface elements, icons, names etc. are still changing, so there really wasn’t much sense in doing translations at this point. Please forgive us the inconvenience, the game will be localized into many languages on its release!
Any updates about a release date?
Not really, to be honest. We’re working hard to make the game as enjoyable, complete and bug-free as possible, which is the most important thing for us. Putting all the things together into a complete game is a complicated process involving many moving parts, so we just can’t be sure when we’ll be ready. Therefore, our Early Access release date still stands as a vague sometime in 2023.
And that is all from us! If you have any more questions, just post a comment or a thread in Community Hub, or even better, head over to our Discord and let’s have a chat :)
Cheers!
Quite OK Team
Laysara: Summit Kingdom’s first demo is now live!
We are thrilled to share that Laysara: Summit Kingdom is part of TactiCon 2023, which means that...
Our first-ever public demo is now available for everyone to check out!
In the demo you’ll get familiar with the basics of the game: citizen caste and satisfaction mechanics, resource transportation, expanding to new sections of the mountain and maybe, just maybe you can glimpse what avalanches in our game are capable of.
TactiCon 2023
TactiCon is a festival here on Steam dedicated to fans of all kinds of strategy games. As organizers are saying:
The second edition of TactiCon gathers over 106 recent and unique strategy games by long-established studios to solo indie game developers. This hand-picked selection tries to embody the broad plurality of the genre, from revisited Grand Strategy to unique Deckbuilding, innovative Turn-Based Tactical and inventive Base Builder and Management games.
We are honoured to be a part of such a great lineup - be sure to check out, you’ll most certainly find some astonishing games in there 🙂
Development progress
We didn’t share many development updates recently, as we’re working full steam to make this demo happen. Fortunately, all of this work will benefit the whole game, as working on the demo allowed us to iterate over many elements and immediately test the results.
Let me give you an example: for an embarrassingly long time we used simple 3D models created by definitely-not-an-artist-person for indicating building statuses.
But no more! Just recently we’ve switched to displaying nice and neat widgets, which you actually can see and understand instead of wondering “What the heck is this red blob rotating above my building”.
This is one of many things that has changed in the game during recent months, but there is no point in describing all of it here: just play the demo and see with your own eyes the current state of the game :)
Of course, the work for us doesn’t end here, we’ve got a ton of things to implement, improve and tweak before the Early Access release later this year, so with your permission, we’re gonna do exactly that :)
Have a great day!
- Quite OK Team
Development schedule and plans update
Following on from the successful Closed Alpha test a few weeks back with our Discord community (if you haven’t joined yet, please do head on over! link), we’ve been sitting here in Quite OK Towers reworking our plans in order to prioritise all of the most important tasks that came up during the test, so we wanted to keep you updated on what’s coming next.
Conclusions after Closed Alpha
Aside from the specific feedback we got from the Closed Alpha, two big things came to light following the test:
- Getting detailed feedback from our amazing community is invaluable, and has already really helped us narrow down on the things that will make the biggest differences to the final game experience,
- In order to deliver the final game we want to, without compromising on features, we’ll need a little more time and money than we were expecting (making games ain’t easy)!
Taking these things into account, we realised that a fairly obvious route forward was staring us right in the face: Steam Early Access. Although we’d initially been hesitant to go down this route, we’ve seen so many great city builders doing this well lately (Timberborn, The Wandering Village, Farthest Frontier, Against the Storm etc), which has definitely changed our minds a bit, and it feels like it could work super well for us, our plans, and hopefully for you, too!
Why Early Access?
So why would Early Access work for Laysara, you ask?
- It’ll allow us to release a little earlier than going straight to 1.0, which will get the game into your hands a little sooner (and will also help us enormously with our budget - we’re a super small team and we’d love to keep paying our rent/eating food),
- It’ll help us bring the community into the project in a more meaningful way, to help us fine tune things and make the 1.0 launch as strong as possible,
- It’ll mean we can price the Early Access lower as a thank you to our biggest supporters before we bump the price up a bit for 1.0!
It’s super important to stress that this won’t be a case of putting out an unfinished game for you to test for us - the Early Access launch will be a very solid experience in its own right, and hopefully one you’d be very happy spending long hours with already. It will focus on delivering a fully fleshed-out Sandbox mode, with a progression system and plenty of objectives to complete as you go, as well as offering a Creative Mode for when you just want to kick back and make pretty looking mountain towns :)
We’re not planning for a long Early Access period - less than a year if things go according to plan, which is basically the time we’ll need to balance and really fine tune the experience, add a few additional features (we’ve got some fun ideas!), and finish off the main Campaign Mode, which we’d be saving for the full 1.0 launch.
Plans for the future
With this new shift to an Early Access plan, we’d be hoping to deliver the Early Access launch by late Summer 2023, with the 1.0 launch coming in the first half of next year. Before all of this, we’ll also be looking to release a shorter public demo, probably around June timing, to get more feedback in preparation for the Early Access launch, and maybe a Beta test somewhere in between if we can squeeze it all in.
If you’ve got any questions at all about our plans, let us know in the comments, or better yet join the Discord as we’re always keeping an eye over there!
See you soon!
Exploring game mechanics: the vicious avalanches
It’s been a while, but again, we’re just super focused on actual development work, as there is still a lot to be done :)
Today we’d like to tell you a little about one of the most distinctive mechanics of Laysara: Summit Kingdom - the almighty avalanches! When building your settlements you’ll have to be constantly aware of the situation around you to prevent the rushing masses of snow from burying your citizens. But do not worry - if you act carefully and thoughtfully, you can save your town from danger.
Snow accumulation
Good news - avalanches don't appear from anywhere. There are places on every mountain where conditions are just right for the treacherous snow caps to form. You’ll be able to see these caps from the very beginning, so identifying exposed slopes below the snow caps and treating them as high-risk areas to build should be your first step.
Another important thing: avalanches don’t fall at random moments, once again, the conditions are the key. Snowfalls and heavy snowstorms increase the amount of snow accumulated on snow caps and that can be enough to trigger an avalanche. However, the most dangerous moment is the period just after the snowfall, when the sun has just started to break through and is warming the snow. There is a high chance for the sufficient amount of snow cover to be melted, which results in - you guessed it - an avalanche fall.
If it doesn’t happen, you’re in luck… but only for the time being. The accumulated snow most likely won’t melt entirely before the next snowfall, which means the next avalanche will contain more mass and be more deadly. Sometimes waiting just makes things worse (and here it is, an unexpected life advance no one asked for!).
Taming the beast
Now you know when and where to expect an avalanche - but what can you do about them? Well, actually, quite a lot.
Forests - trees are your first line of defence, as only those deeply-rooted stoics can withstand the full force of the impact and don’t crumble doing so. So, make good use of your foresters, but don’t think it’ll solve all your problems. You see, the trees don’t grow right to next each other and although extremely durable, forests are not the tightest obstacle in the world. That means they will significantly reduce the force of the falling mass but won’t stop it completely in the vast majority of cases.
Fortunately, this can be mitigated by the Avalanche Barrier. This special kind of fence is designed precisely to stop the small avalanches or the ones that have already lost most of their energy. Use them wisely and not a single snowflake will reach your town, but expose them to too much strain and they will collapse like a paltry chicken coop.
But what to do when you want to protect your folks from the rarest, but most powerful avalanches? Well, one solution would be just to plant more trees and cover larger areas with forests. That would work, but it’s not like clear land to build is an omnipresent luxury in the mountains. So, there is one last secret weapon you can utilize in your fight against the elements.
Avalanche Inducers - the extremely clever design of this structure allows you to artificially trigger an avalanche before the snow accumulation reaches a critical level, which would cause the next event to be extremely powerful. Avalanche Inducers are quite demanding in terms of resources and workforce (ahem, yakforce?) to maintain, but it can effectively cap the power of incoming avalanches and guarantee the falls stay manageable, rather than giving nature a chance to hit you harder than you’re able to take.
And there you have it - a guide on how to survive probably the most dangerous weather-related hazard you’ll encounter in the game. It’ll probably take you some time (and a few destroyed huts and workshops) to become a master in snow-protection tactics, but with proper care and preparation saving your citizens from death under tons of snow is 100% achievable. Just don’t underestimate nature. And be alert when those white little beauties start to fall from the sky :)
Release date update
One last thing - unfortunately, we won't be able to launch the game in Q1 2023 as originally planned. The reason is really simple, we just underestimated how long the development will take us. We definitely don't want to release an unfinished and/or broken game, so we're going to launch Laysara sometime later in 2023 - we'll let you know the exact date when we figure it out ourselves :)
If you don't want to wait so long, there is a way to try out the game earlier - head to our Discord server where we'll be recruiting volunteers for the closed alpha testing at the beginning of 2023 :)
So, now it’s time to enjoy the safer side of the winter (at least for us, there is snow everywhere around here where we live!) and recharge your batteries before 2023 shows what it has in store for us. Happy Holidays everyone! Wesołych świąt :)
Behind the scenes: the struggle for house variety
Long time no see, we know, but that doesn't mean we weren't working hard on the game during this time!
Today, let's talk about graphics. Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a city-builder, so obviously, one of the most important graphical assets we need to make are buildings. There will be 100+ 3D building models in the game (some buildings will have multiple visual variations, as will be shown below) as we want to enable you to create beautiful and varied towns, not filled with "clones".
This is why some of the structures have different visual variations. Take houses for example, which will be ever present in the residential districts. This is how many 3D models of those we have now:
(click here to zoom in)
In general, there are only three types of houses, one for citizens of each caste. Houses can be upgraded up to three times, so that's four upgrade stages for each house. Then, each house stage has four visual variations, depending on its surroundings. If you take all of the combinations, the picture above shows you what you end up with :)
This is a lot of 3D models to make, but as a result, you don't have a feeling that your town consists of tons of copy-pasted buildings.
But at the beginning, we didn't have all of these variations, of course. It was just one 3D model for each upgrade stage, even missing the one for the highest upgrade.
Actually, this is exactly what we had when releasing our first trailer: click here for the Reveal trailer
Our next step was to create prototypes of all the missing variations, to figure out the rough geometry and shapes the models should have to look good with each other.
And once we were happy with the results, we could add some more detail to have all the variations at the same quality level.
This is where we are now, but the work doesn't stop here! All of the house models will go through the final polishing pass, to add some more detail and textures, correct/optimize their geometry data and simply make them look more realistic (but within the game's art style, of course).
Holidays!
All right, all right, we weren't working ALL the time - we had a few weeks off to charge batteries before digging deep in the development work again. It's good to have time for taking in some inspiration :)
And that's all for this update! Thank you very much for your support, we will be back with some more juicy info about the game soon :)
Maciek & Michał
PC Gaming Show, Discord server & Development update
Today we’ve got a bunch of updates to share, so if you’re interested in what has been happening behind the scenes for the last few months, you’re in the right place :) Let’s start with the most exciting stuff first.
PC Gaming Show
Laysara: Summit Kingdom was a part of this year’s PC Gaming Show with a brand new trailer! If you haven’t seen it already, you can give it a watch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyJnA_mehI0
The trailer showcases a feature we have never shown before: building mines on mountain faces/cliffs. While most buildings can be placed only on flat mountain slopes, a few special buildings can be built only on raw resource deposits on cliffs, outside of standard gameplay areas.
Super professional way for building exactly the same road layout while capturing gameplay - arrows taped to the monitor.
Tea bags jenga tower, a side effect of editing the trailer until 4 a.m.
Future Friends Games
We’re also very happy to announce that we’ve signed a publishing deal with Future Friends Games. They are experienced and competent, yet very small - which is just perfect for us, only a 2-person team :) We decided to sign with a publisher for two main reasons: firstly, to secure some funding for the rest of the development, and secondly, to have someone to help us with biz-dev/marketing topics, so we as developers can focus on just making the game.
The process of speaking/negotiating with different publishers was something that has occupied us pretty heavily in recent months. We had no idea how time-consuming it will be, so now we have to update our production schedule. There is still much to be done in terms of game development and it turns out, we won’t be able to finish the game in 2022 as originally planned, so we’re now aiming to release in Q1 2023.
Discord server
And the last piece of news: the official Laysara’s Discord server is now up! If you are waiting for the game, want to chat with us or other folks interested in the game and want to take part in future beta tests - then simply, just join our Discord :)
Link: https://discord.gg/USEKsNGzMG
And that’s all for today! Until next time :)
Maciek & Michał
Social castes in Laysara: Summit Kingdom
Let us tell you about a key ingredient to any thriving town and settlement: its population.
In our game, the society consists of three castes. However, the castes aren't aligned in a feudal-like hierarchy, where you can have "low" classes and "elite" classes, clearly differentiating in desirability. In Laysara, no caste is superior to one another - they all have different backgrounds, specializations and likings. Your job is to ensure that each caste members work in a complementary way to each other creating a synergy of different specialities and competencies.
What does it mean gameplay-wise? Your population is divided into three labour pools and every building needs workers from a specific pool in order to operate (tip: look at the roof colour!). You increase the number of available workers by building a specific residential building, different for each caste. Lastly, the needs and requirements of each caste members are slightly different - for example, while all need food, some need less, some need more, and members of each caste have different preferred food products.
Commoners
These are the folks who live in harsh mountain conditions on a daily basis. Their knowledge of mountain climate and environment makes them great farmers and breeders. As they live on the high attitude from generations, they grew accustomed to the heights and can perform even very hard labour for your town.
As a result, Commoners will be the backbone of your economy, responsible for the food production and transportation of goods. They also work in basic processing buildings, such as Cheesemaker (which produces Chees from yaks' Milk) or Charcoal Pile (which processes Wood into Coal), and extraction buildings, such as Lumbermill and different types of mines.
Lowlanders
Lowlanders were living in large, wealthy and comfortable cities in the valleys until they were forced to seek a new home in the uplands. They long for their old ways of life, full of comforts and luxury. Keeping them happy will require a lot of effort from you, but they are worth it.
Lowlanders are master craftsmen and manufacturers. They work in workshops, where they transform raw materials into luxurious goods, which then can be distributed to all citizens (making them more content) or designed for the trade. Lowlanders also operate welfare buildings, such as Inn or Hot Baths.
Monks
And at last, we have Monks. These are people who have sacrificed themselves in the search of inner strength and equilibrium. They tend to the spiritual needs of all of your citizens, which is vital for their wellbeing.
You can find Monks in various objects in some ways related to religious practices and meditations, such as Shrine and Bell. Monks prefer to live in encircled monastery complexes - where they also work in selected industry branches, examples being the production of Incense and growing Herbs.
Summary
As you can see, your towns need all three castes to thrive. Of course, the proportions are not rigid, and sometimes you can rely more heavily on one of them if this makes the most sense in given circumstances, or if you just feel like it. Finding and maintaining balance is the key.
We hope you will forgive us for the somewhat vague and laconic descriptions of castes' backgrounds - the game lore is still forming up, and we'll give you more insight into it in the future :)
Maciek & Michał