Aquitect press kit

Raise an island from an open sea and build a city where every neighbour counts.

Aquitect is a relaxing city builder that starts with an empty ocean. Buy land plot by plot and draw your own coastline, then place buildings where seventy-one adjacency rules reward the right neighbours. Grow through four eras from windmills to fusion, climb down from the planner's sky to drive deliveries, sail against pirates and pilot a submarine, and, late in the game, let the Rising Tide flood your city under shield domes. No fail state, no wait timers, no microtransactions.

Raise an island from the sea. Every city starts with an empty ocean. Buy land plot by plot and shape your own coastline: a sheltered bay, a long trading shore, or a scatter of green islets. The sea runs on in every direction, so your island can be a straight line, a ring around a lagoon, or any shape you can draw with land. The island is yours before the first house is.

Every neighbour counts. Placement is the game. Seventy-one adjacency rules read the grid: a Bakery beside a Water Tower earns more, a Market undercuts the corner shop, a Wind Mill hates houses in its wind. Parks and hospitals lift the streets around them; factories and coal plants poison them, and a Sky Garden parked beside a polluter cleans its air. Drag a building and the game tells you what it gets and what it gives before you commit.

Four eras, one city. Grow from a farm to a town, a city and a technological hub. Each tier brings new buildings and a new problem: power at Tier 2, happiness and pollution at Tier 3, research at Tier 4. A quest chain of fifty-three steps teaches each mechanic the moment the economy introduces it. Or skip the story entirely: Free build starts you with a little gold, no quests, and the whole sea to yourself.

Then climb down. At any moment, leave the planner's sky. Drive a delivery from the farm to the store, sail the catch to the marina, fly supplies to the hospital roof. Upgrade the Garage and unlock eight cars, from the farm ute to the stretch limo. When a wooden pirate ship anchors off your modern coast, take the boat out and hose it off with the water cannon; when a thief hits a shop, ram him, or let the police you built do it.

The Rising Tide. Late in the game, build a Submarine Lab and the sea starts to rise. Every ten minutes the water comes in over the whole island, and for three minutes your city keeps running under shield domes while research triples. Take the submarine out, collect the samples drifting between the towers, and watch the fish swim over the rooftops. It is opt-in, it never costs you gold, and it is the strangest, calmest three minutes in the game.

A premium, peaceful toy. Vibrant low-poly art, a calm soundtrack, no fail state, no wait timers, no microtransactions. Walk away for a day and come back to a city that is fine. A first run to the landmark takes a little over two hours; then prestige, keep your bonuses, and build again on a fresh sea. Every city can be replayed as a timelapse, and a full City Statistics overlay explains every coin for the players who like to know why.

Aquitect is the work of one developer. Sotiris Tsartsaris, founder of the Thessaloniki software studio Bytetect, has been building it in Unity alongside the studio's client work. It began as an idle city builder and grew, one system at a time, into a full placement game: the open sea came first, then the adjacency rules, then the vehicles that let you climb down into the city you planned, and finally the Rising Tide. The whole economy is tuned by a bot that plays the game end to end, so every number a player sees has been earned by the same rules they play by.