Hi everyone!
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!
