Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a challenging city builder which tasks you with creating a new home for your people forced out of the lowlands. During a campaign or sandbox playthrough, you will establish multiple towns, each on a unique mountain with its own traits. All your towns co-exist in symbiosis, creating a trading network, which you can then adjust to your needs by revisiting already developed settlements. The Kingdom of Laysara has to be rebuilt!

Each mountain comes with a new set of challenges. Mounts differ in shapes, vegetation zone layouts, resource availability and weather conditions. Sometimes you will have plenty of room for farming in green lowlands, sometimes you will need to rely on breeding and extracting valuable minerals from regions dangerously close to peak glaciers. If you find yourself in dire need of a certain resource, you can always try to establish a trading route with another town.

One of the ever-present dangers you will have to deal with are mighty avalanches. You can’t stop them, but you can take precautions and be prepared. Afforest the key areas to create natural barriers, build artificial ones to redirect rushing masses of snow, or trigger the avalanche early, while it’s still manageable. Create a deliberate and reliable strategy and you might even be able to use the power of snow to your advantage; fail to do so and find your city buried and devastated!

So, transporting goods is easy, right? Well, not if your destination lies on the other side of the mountain, a few hundred meters higher, behind cliffs, ridges, canyons and rivers. You will need to create a vast, complex transport network consisting of roads, bridges and shafts to ensure reliable delivery chains. As demand for resources will grow alongside the town’s population, always look for opportunities to optimise your transportation network, be it by building paved roads, using more advanced lifting constructions, or aiding your carriers with glamorous yaks.

Developer Quite OK Games announced that Laysara: Summit Kingdom is now targeting an early 2024 launch into Steam Early Access, and will remain so for about 6-12 months.

"Delaying the Early Access launch was not an easy decision to make. We really want to release Laysara as soon as possible, but we realized we'll need some extra time to deliver a polished and complete experience on launch - there are only three of us, so sometimes things take longer than we'd like to. However, releasing a solid game enjoyable for every city-builder fan out there remains our top priority, it'll just take us a little longer."

Development status

To give you some more insight into where we’re currently sitting at:  Laysara is basically feature complete, meaning all the game mechanics are implemented and working as intended. Some mechanics are pretty much finished, and others require a little more polish and updated final assets. Of course, we’re also constantly playing around with the game’s balance, looking for and fixing bugs, and implementing various optimizations and improvements to our game systems.

We’re also working on creating multiple mountains with different features. These will serve as levels in our game and will give you a variety of sceneries to establish a thriving city in. We’ll probably write a separate post about them in the future to highlight what you can expect.

We’re also constantly upgrading the visual quality of our game, to make it easier to immerse yourself in the world of Laysara. As an example, we’re in the process of adding new 3D models and custom animations of all the animals and workers!

We also regularly play the game together to review our progress, discuss if we’re happy with recent changes and decide / prioritize what else needs to be done. We’re working remotely from different cities so we usually do this during video calls, but recently we’ve met up to play Laysara together in real life - it’s been actually super beneficial to do this in person. Seeing each other face-to-face has been really nice.

If you manage to endure all mountain dangers, build a network of efficient production chains and satisfy all needs of your people, there is only one more thing to be done: conquering the mountain peak! To succeed in this great endeavour you’ll need to reach the summit and establish safe routes for your carriers to bring in enormous amounts of building resources, but beware! Weather at this height is as deadly as ever. The final effect is well worth the effort though, as raising the summit temple is an act of total triumph of human courage (and your logistics skills!) over the elements.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is a pure city building experience solely focused on the economy, resource management and surviving despite the inhospitable environment. Therefore, the game doesn’t feature combat or any other military aspect.

Key Features:

• Build on a mountain. Each mountain offers a unique set of challenges; different shapes, vegetation zone layouts, resource availability and weather conditions.
• Deal with avalanches. Nature cannot be stopped. Plan and strategise to deal with avalanches, or watch your city be buried and devastated.
• Craft a transport network. Transporting becomes a challenge across mountain summits. Look for opportunities to optimise your transport and production networks across ridges, canyons and rivers. Glamorous yaks are always available.
• Raise a Summit Temple. Build your way up the mountain, establish a grand temple at the peak, and triumph over the elements.

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is coming to PC (Steam) in 2024/2024.