Hello everyone!
The demo period has been very insightful for us, so today we’d like to talk you through some of our learnings from the demo and our plans leading up to the Early Access release. Though, there’s something else we’d like to tell you first!
Demo extension
To start us off, we have an exciting announcement. A lot of you asked for us to extend the demo, so we did! The demo has been extended until Monday, March 25th. This gives you a whole extra month to try out the demo or get truly creative with the tools at your disposal.
However, we currently have no plans for any additional updates for the demo. You’ll have to do with what’s there now! If you haven’t already, be sure to opt-in for the Pins branch to try out Pins and complete some new challenges! You can read about how to install the update here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/4042612637275401107
General feedback
We’ve received a ton of feedback from all of you. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much! Hearing your thoughts and having discussions with all of you really helps us out developing shapez 2. There’s been very little negative feedback, though there were some recurring topics worth pointing out.
First up, the reusability of shapes and production lines wasn’t great. You at times had to remove what you just built to make space for a completely different shape. This simply doesn’t feel good, as if you’re not really progressing. We’ve already taken action to address this and have already significantly changed the research system to allow you to reuse shapes and expand upon your existing production lines. If you’re a Patreon, you already have partial access to the reworked system.
(New research system menu mock up – early WIP)
There were a lot of suggestions for features and changes we were already working on, but did not make it into the demo. We sadly had to cut out some features to make it in time for the Steam Next Fest. Included in this list are a lot of the further performance enhancements we explained in devlog 011 as well as certain Quality of Life features for the Blueprint library, which was missing folders, icons and more.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800/view/3710460746137286714?l=english
The Pin Pusher you could unlock in the Pins branch has already seen a significant rework to make it more interesting than just pins being essentially a fifth shape.
You can find all the suggestions we are planning to add to shapez 2 on https://shapez-2.nolt.io/. Make sure to use the filters available to get a good idea of what we’re currently working on and what we’re planning for the future.
Known issues and plans to fix them
There were quite a significant amount of issues with the exclusive fullscreen mode of shapez 2. This includes difficulty alt+tabbing, flickering during the load screen, overlays not working or functioning correctly, misaligned cursors and certain crashes. These issues can be traced back to Vulkan, the graphics API we are using, and Unity, the game’s engine. We expect these issues to be resolved if we were to switch to DX12, so that’s something we are currently considering.
Rebinding keybindings and overlapping keybinds is something that could use some love. We plan to really improve this experience ahead of Early Access.
Performance in general was really solid, especially considering not all the optimizations we were working on made it into the demo. Some players were encountering unexpected performance issues however, even on systems that should easily be able to run shapez 2. We are looking into these edge cases and hope to fix them, but with some many possible PC configurations we can’t promise to fix them all.
The brave pioneers who journeyed to the “farlands” may have seen some graphical issues along the way. If you move far enough away from the hub, the map would get choppy because of floating point issues. We plan to fix this, but it’s currently not a priority for the Early Access release as most players will never come across this.
We are happy though that most players did not encounter any issues during their time with the demo.
Moving forward
Currently, we’re focusing on the mid- and end game where you’re really expanding your factory with the use of space platforms. We are prototyping and finalizing the mechanics we have planned for this portion of the game. This includes trains, space belts, fluids and the new research tree.
Work in progress
Progress is being made on improving the simulation to be fully precise, even when out of view. This feature was disabled for the demo as the scale is quite small, but this is something that needs to work in the full game. Slowing down the tick rate of the parts of the factory that are out of view allows for massive performance gains and will keep the game running smoothly when your factory reaches gargantuan sizes.
Once we’re happy with the state of the mid- and end game mechanics, we’ll move into production mode again. This is where we work on art for the mechanics, refinement, balancing, quality of life improvements and wrap it together into a finished product.
We move into the bug fixing, localization and quality assurance phase once all the features are in. This is the last step, and after this the game is ready to release in Early Access. It’s our goal to deliver a very polished experience straight from the get-go. That’s to say, while the game will release in Early Access, we internally treat it as the big 1.0 release.
To close it all off, here are some player stats from the demo:
The demo was played by 109,477 unique users so far. The median time played comes in at 48 minutes. The milestones you hit are as follows:
- 73% of players reached the Stacker milestone, with a median time to complete at 15 minutes
- 48% of players reached the Blueprint milestone, with a median time to complete at 49 minutes
- 29% of players finished the demo, with a median time to complete at 2 hours and 49 minutes
- 6,7% of players finished the extra demo challenges, with a median time to complete at 5 hours
In two weeks, your regularly-scheduled progress devlogs will finally return. We have a lot to discuss, as we've made some good progress on trains, space belts, the new pin pusher design and much more – like the new vortex platform design as seen below.
Thank you again, and see you soon.
~ Tobias & the shapez 2 team
Be sure to wishlist shapez 2 and play the demo!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/