WIth the release of 1.0 on April 23 being less than a month away, we wanted to look back at the journey that was shapez 2 Early Access. Before we get to shapez 2 however, we need to go back further – to shapez.io!

Development of shapez

In Early 2020, the development of shapez.io was started as a one-man project. If you haven't played it, it's a minimalistic factory automation game where you could cut, rotate, paint and merge into progressively more complex shapes on an infinitely expanding map. Not totally unlike shapez 2, but it looked a little different.

It was a simple idea, first inspired by the little wooden shape toys many played with in their early years as a destined-to-be factory builder. Then it became inspired by Factorio as well, intended as a more streamlined approach to the factory genre, removing the pressure of combat to instead focus on pure automation. 

The initial success of shapez.io and the release on Steam lead to the creation of tobspr Games and it growing to the 15 members it has today. During that process, development on shapez 2 was also started, which sought to expand on shapez and would be rebuilt from the ground up.

Why rebuilt, you ask? Well, shapez was written in JavaScript, which kind of makes it a glorified website. There was no support for efficient rendering or memory management. Scaling up much beyond what was needed would cause severe performance issues. Fixing this issue requires a rebuild from scratch, which is one of the many factors that lead to the creation of the sequel.

Development of shapez 2

Keeping the core foundation of shapez in mind, prototyping of shapez 2 started in 2022 and was followed by dedicated production in 2023 – which is still going strong! shapez 2 quickly got to a playable stage, but it has evolved a lot since then. 

The real challenge for shapez 2 was taking already established features in other factory games, such as the train system, and finding a way to innovate it and make it unique to shapez. This was greatly helped by the community, who were often involved in the process. We asked them for their thoughts and feedback for various iterations of the train system and many other elements of the game, well before the Early Access release of shapez 2.

shapez 2 Early Access release

Speaking of which, Early Access released on August 15th, 2024! shapez 2 took the familiar gameplay of shapez 1 with a brand new take on it, in a 3D world with a new art style and larger scale. Space Belts bound together platforms, pipes replaced belts for paint transport, and trains could be dunked directly into a vortex. Neat.

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The 3D nature of shapez 2 gave us the opportunity to make all buildings open and animated, something that sets this game apart from most other factory games. You could see every shape being split, painted, stacked, you name it! Not only is it fun to look at, it can also help you understand what exactly each building is doing and why. This is something we're very proud of! Looking back at the process, shapez feel very much like a prototype of shapez 2, rather than shapez 2 being shapez in 3D. Though, of course there's plenty to love about shapez 1 as well.

The launch of Early Access far exceeded our expectations, and the response took us by complete surprise. It maintained a 100% positive review rate on Steam for quite some time, eventually settling around 97-98%. This didn't change our intentions however, as we wanted to continue taking on feedback on a larger scale than we had before, further developing the game and its systems. Rather than rush to 1.0, we wanted to take the time to refine all its elements and polish it into a game you'll love just as much as we do. 

The best way to do this was to release in Early Access with all the core features in place to create a fully playable experience you could give feedback on. We produced (mostly) bi-weekly devlogs to keep you up to date with the developments and things we were considering, so you could voice your thoughts before we spent a whole lot of time going into a different direction. We also took part of Gamescom last year so we could meet a lot of you in person, and we're planning to return this year as well.

Update 0.0.9

This paved the way to the first significant update at the end of 2024. Update 0.0.9 brought major optimization for multi-core processors, giving up to 40x performance gains on specific systems. We reworked space belt and pipe visuals to better show the belt layers, a new statistics panel and new platform variants. There were a ton of smaller improvements and bug fixes as well, powered by all of you!

Dimensions Update

In June of 2025 we released the Dimensions update, taking the single-layer platform building you were used to and adding a whole two more layers! While before you had to build outwards for space, you could now build up or down as well and connect everything up without the need for massive space belts – which got its throughput quadrupled! Trains got more efficient as well with new logic, adding quick stops and the ability to pick which layers stations would unload. More upgrades and train colors were added as well to complete the shapez rainbow. To help fit everything together, more platform layouts were added and the long-awaited overflow splitters for belts.

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This update gave us some truly valuable feedback from the community. It was great in terms of quality of life and some exciting new features, like the whole dimensions thing, but it wasn't enough for many to jump back into shapez 2. After all, you'd still be playing the same game for the most part. To get people back, we needed to go bigger. A whole new game mode bigger.

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The 1.0 release of shapez 2

That's where we're at now! We've expanded to doing video content together with Tom of TotalXclipse alongside the devlogs and introduced the Manufacture Mode in early February of this year, which we're hoping is enough to want you to dive into shapez 2 all over again – if you weren't already! Alongside the new game mode, we've revealed the changes coming to Classic Mode, new shapes, new challenges, achievements, improved visuals and a whole bunch of quality of life additions thanks to your suggestions.

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We'll soon also dive into the topic of full mod support as we know this is the biggest topic left for us to tackle, but we want to commit some finishing touches before we showcase all of it.

We hope this blast from the past was an interesting look into the development of the shapez games. As you can hopefully tell, community feedback is key to these games and none of it would've been possible without you. The full release of shapez 2 isn't the end either as we intend to provide more updates based on your feedback on 1.0! 

Something we do want to mention is that the minimum and recommended system specs displayed on Steam will be increased somewhat with the release of 1.0. We're doing this increase not because the game performs worse after 1.0 – in fact, it's likely to run better – but we feel the current system requirements do not reflect performance accurately enough and want to set more realistic expectations. If your system can already run shapez 2, it will continue to do so with the same or slightly better performance.

Our current estimations are as follows. Do not that these aren't final yet, and we'd love to hear how you feel about these. Details on Mac will follow later.

That's it for now, and we'll see you again soon!