Hi!
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