Hello everyone!
The day has come! Today, Laysara finishes its Early Access period and launches in version 1.0!
You can find the full patch notes at the bottom of this post, but the most important thing is, of course, the campaign! We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and now we’re delighted to finally put it into your hands!
While most of its 15 missions are designed as a challenge to make you crack your head in a way that only Laysara does, the beginning of the campaign serves as a smooth introduction to the game, with a reworked, polished, and better-paced tutorial. So, if you have been waiting to try your luck in the kingdom of Laysara, wait no more! With a huge discount for the occasion, there won’t be a better time to conquer the mountains.
And now, let us take you on a sentimental journey and show you how far Laysara has come until this day, starting from the very, very beginning…
Humble beginnings
It all started back in the final months of 2019 - I had just left my job in a gamedev studio because I was tired of following someone’s vision. Having some savings, I decided it’d be a perfectly fine idea to spend it all on making my own game. How hard can it be?!
The game I used to play like a maniac when I was a child was Zeus: Master of Olympus. I quickly decided to make a city-building game that would be heavily inspired by Zeus, but with modern design decisions. I wanted to recreate the feeling of having a beautiful, colourful, and lively city that works like a well-oiled machine, with districts fulfilling different functions in a huge and complicated, but reliable, network of production and transportation.
With that direction in mind, I set out into the unknown and started working. After some time, I had something like this:
Well, I’m sure you won’t be able to tell, but I’m not an artist. This was a pretty bare-bones, but functional technical prototype of a city-building game. It had mechanics like resource production, transportation, and distribution to citizens living in houses. It also had an element of verticality: at some point, I thought it’d be cool if you could build on multiple levels, because why not?
So, it worked, but it looked like crap. It was about time to bring an artist on board. When I showed Michał, aka Pirat, my prototype, at first he was nice. He told me that he’d try to think of a setting and art direction that could work.
But after a short internal fight, Pirat decided that if we were to work together, sugar-coating wouldn’t do. He patiently explained to me one of the fundamentals of designing basically anything: if you have something that is random and makes no sense, and try to beautify it, it’ll still be bad. If you put a bunch of glitter on a pile of poo, it may glitter, but it’s still poop.
I love working with Pirat.
So, at the start of 2021, we went back to the drawing board with a very precise goal: to find a visual identity for the game. We liked the genre, we liked the vertical elements, but other than that, everything was on the table. So we brainstormed: Cities of the Incas? Pre-industrial Alaska? Circles of Hell? Balloonpunk? The immune system of the human body? There are no stupid ideas during a brainstorm, they say.
But once I saw this picture, in the back of my head I already knew what we would choose.
And that’s how we decided on the game’s visual identity: we just fell in love with the aesthetics of the architecture of the region and how well it supports verticality in gameplay. And, of course, the yaks <3 The concept of a mountain city builder was born.
The real work starts
To verify if this idea was as good in reality as it was in our minds, we did a few mockups: no gameplay, just some low-quality assets arranged in a rough diorama to illustrate the concept.
And something on a larger scale (yes, placing every single building on the slopes without any helper tools was as tedious as you think it was):
Those images guided us through the whole development process, so we wouldn’t forget what the core idea was and what we wanted to achieve. Spoiler: we did end up pretty damn close!
Around that time, we also commissioned our key art to reinforce our vision even more and to do some initial work on figuring out the colour palette for the game. We ended up using this image absolutely everywhere - we love it so much!
With that established, it was time to start the grind: while Pirat worked on the first, simplified versions of the 3D assets, I adjusted my technical prototype to support building on multiple, angled slopes. Things were starting to come together: you could actually play the game on a mountain, for the very first time! We were figuring out things like the caste system, what buildings we needed in the game, what resources they were producing or processing, etc. The game was slowly but surely taking shape.
There was only one problem: you remember the “some savings” I mentioned earlier? Well, they were long gone at this point. I borrowed money from my friends and family to keep this endeavour going. Looking back, I have to say it was pretty intense. I remember going to a gas station, putting in whatever I could afford at the moment, and having the reserve light still on when driving out of the station. However, we truly believed that we had something special on our hands, and that kept us going.
It became clear we wouldn’t be able to finish this project on our own, though. We needed support, and to get it, we needed to reveal the game to the world. So, we put up a simple trailer and, in December 2021, showcased Laysara for the very first time. A few screenshots from that time:
Our reveal got some attention, but it wasn’t like all major sites were writing piece after piece about Laysara. No, things were developing rather slowly, but then we had a breakthrough: despite a rather crooked and cringey title - 100% true, though - our Reddit post got catapulted to the front page of Reddit with 74k upvotes (I wonder how many of you are here because of it :) Let me know in the comments!). That really put us in another league in terms of discoverability and recognition.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/rrbkqs/i_spent_a_whole_year_and_all_my_personal_savings/
The response was overwhelmingly positive, but it’s Reddit, so we also got our share of… scepticism. Some of those comments I cherish in my heart to this very day.
Besides gathering a ton of wishlists, the Reddit effect also had another result: publishers started showing interest in working with us! We took our sweet time to figure out who would be the best fit for us, passed on a few pretty big names, and finally signed a contract with Future Friends Games - a small publisher who, just like us, don’t really care about corporate processes and facade, but just getting things done. With their support, we could focus on what we do best: developing the game!
The grind continues
I won’t go into detail describing the next 2.5 years it took us to release the game into Early Access, because this post would have to become a book - let’s just say, it was quite a ride. And, as with every ride, it had its ups and downs.
There were moments of doubt, moments of excitement, moments of despair, moments of joy, and a lot, lot of work. Turns out, in gamedev, you very rarely hit the mark on your first try. You do the first version, and then you iterate. You must not get discouraged when your first try results in this:
But gradually turn it into this:
And then this:
And, finally, into this:
It was the same story with building models: start with basic shapes, check if they work, and gradually increase their quality, making sure all the visuals across the game stay coherent.
The big moments for us were closed pre-alpha tests, which we did through our Discord server (high-five, folks! Thanks for your help!), and then Steam Next Fest, when our demo was in the top 50 most-played demos. We used those opportunities to check if the gameplay was coming together as we envisioned, and of course, to listen to players' feedback. Fortunately, the huge majority of it made sense to us, and we were going to implement such features and improvements either way, so that worked out well!
During this time, we also welcomed the third member of our team - programmer Paweł - to help speed things up. I’m quite sure it was a really good decision, and only thanks to him did we have to delay the game’s release date 3 times, not 10 or 20. Yeah, we absolutely suck at planning, but when you’re making your first game on your own, it’s really hard to get it right. We’ll do better with the next one!
And speaking of team members… did you know that we tried to do a motion capture session with a yak to get top-quality animations? It didn’t work, but we have no idea why.
Early Access
Finally, in April 2024, we managed to release Laysara in EA! We crunched like crazy for the last few months to do it before Manor Lords launch, which was probably a necessary decision, but it really took a toll on us. That’s the reason the first content updates didn’t appear as quickly as we’d have liked, but at that point, it wasn’t a matter of deciding whether to take a break or not - the break just happened, regardless of how we felt about it. You can only push so much before you reach your limits, both physically and mentally. I really advise slowing down before hitting the wall - it wasn’t a fun experience at all.
However, after a few slower months, we recovered and got back on track with expanding the game with the features it needed to become a complete, fulfilling experience. We started with Ice Altars: a way to boost the production of already set-up production buildings and districts, which added another layer of strategy to maximising efficiency - something Laysara is all about.
Then we introduced a Sandbox Mode, in which your playthrough is no longer contained to a single mountain: you create a trade network between multiple mountains, freely switching between towns. It allows you to focus on specialisation even more: not only can you have specialised districts on a mountain, but a whole mountain itself can be dedicated to a specific purpose.
And last but not least, the Tunnels: the most advanced method of goods transportation within a single mountain. Yet again, we wanted to add another tool to players’ belts so they can create even more efficient city layouts and complicated transportation networks.
Of course, during the EA period, we also fixed a ton of bugs and introduced a huge number of bigger and smaller quality-of-life tweaks and improvements. It was really great having players constantly test out the newest versions of the game and getting feedback almost instantaneously. We spent a lot of time discussing various elements of the game on our Discord server, which was both helpful for development and very rewarding for us as developers.
The game was missing its key component all this time, though, and that is the Campaign mode. Today, as Laysara launches in 1.0, we’re finally putting into your hands this last piece of the puzzle!
The game, therefore, is now complete. Of course, that doesn’t mean we won’t be maintaining it, supporting you, and adding more content - we will! These won’t be things that substantially change the experience, though, unlike the major content updates throughout EA. Laysara has finally reached the shape we wanted it to have from the moment we came up with the vertical city builder theme.
What more can I say - thank you for sticking with us! We wouldn’t have been able to make this game and live our dream without you :) You’re the best!
And now, go! The Kingdom of Laysara won’t save itself!
Full patch notes:
Main changes:
Campaign mode introduced!
Game translated to Czech, Italian and Traditional Chinese
When moving a building, its range visualisation is now visible
When placing a building, its range visualisation is shown even if it's impossible to build it in the current location
Placing gates on roads right next to the shaft/bridge entry is now possible
Save files are now compressed (and have ~3% of the original disk size). This doesn't break save files compatibility.
Balance changes:
Balance: Mint building cost 200 -> 150
Balance: Compact Yak Breeder building cost 50 -> 80
Balance: Baths building cost 50 -> 80
(Values scale with difficulty, those are for Professional)
Tweaks:
If there are ad hoc workers, include them in "Total" info in workers tooltip (eg. "43 + 3", if there are 3 ad hoc workers)
Pressing Enter after typing a save name in "Save Game As" menu will ast as pressing the Save button
Tweak: Multiple small changes in texts in multiple languages
Bugfixes:
Bugfix: Selecting a building through the mountain is no longer possible
Bugfix: The game is not crashing anymore when recalculating the low morale penalty (after failed Weather Breakdown quest) with the World Map opened
Bugfix: Pause research level update if the World Map is opened to prevent a possible situation of switching mountains with a negative money balance (which is not allowed and would result in game crashing)
Bugfix: Don't show magnifying glass button in Shrine/Inn UI panels when there are no resources being sent to it
Bugfix: Multiple Mr. Plows can now properly work together, even if their ranged overlap
Bugfix: Properly saving Mr. Plows state into a save file
Bugfix: Don't show "Bought resources are not transported anywhere" warning if buying 0 units of a resource
Bugfix: Properly set view point for Lift Towers
Bugfix: Upkeep on gates fixed
Bugfix: Bridge models don't disappear anymore
Bugfix: A hole in the terrain fixed on Quartzfall mountain
Bugfix: Transport route visualisation lines are no longer clipping with the terrain
Bugfix: Carriers should no longer disappear after loading a game
Bugfix: Resource deposits UI panels no longer block the cursor on gameplay areas (that was a case with a few particular deposits)
Bugfix: In the objective regarding sending resources into the Tunnels, count resources being sent there, not available in the Tunnel system
