>Shapez 2 is the purest factory building game imaginable - all buildings are free, resources never run out and there are no enemies or time limits
What is the motivator of the primary gameplay loop? If I never have to make a hard decision on how to use an earned resource then it devalues my autonomy.
Efficiency (in time and space). You can build a simple machine that finishes the task in five slow hours or you can parallelize, stack, route, etc. it and do it in a few minutes. Kinda a programming/logistics game in that regard, IMO.
Even in similar games like Dyson Sphere Program, you can play with cheats on (infinite or free resources) and but it's still a challenge to scale up production.
If you play on the harder difficulties, you are limited by the number of platforms you can build (even if you later delete one). You earn more by delivering certain shapes, with more complex shapes giving more points. It means your platforms both need to be efficient, and you need to be thoughtful in how you place them.
> What is the motivator of the primary gameplay loop?
For me, it's about my intrinsic motivation to come up with cleaner/simpler machines that are nonetheless efficient. MAMs ("make anything" machines) are a pretty damn fun challenge to build efficiently.
Whenever I play Factorio, I play with the Biters turned off. For me, it's about managing the throughput and the aesthetics of the factory I'm building.
I still run out of resources, but typically by that point I have enough stuff that creating mining outposts is trivial, and in fact significantly better - I get trains full of raw ore, iron plates, and steel instead of having a big chunk of my primary factory devoted to processing that stuff.
The appeal of it perplexes me. On paper, its a visual game about figuring out some random chains of function applications (cutters, stackers, painters, rotators) applied to a stream of shapes - sounds like a boring chore, but actually a very rewarding and addictive experience. Go try figure us out, squishy brains, rewarding themselves after attaching a virtual belt full of vietual squares to a gizmo that produces a belt full of halved virtual squares on screen. Humans are weird.
I love Shapez 1, it's really a game I can recommend to people who love puzzles, planing, organizing stuff and those things. So I also tried the Demo for Shapez 2 when It released, but I kinda didn't vibed for me, the old charm is not there. I think it's because it's now 3D, and controls were also a bit wobbly and shaky at the time. Does anyone know if this has been improved till then? Or is this version just more content than the demo?
I also enjoyed shapez 1 more and don't really like this 3D version as much. The controls are... difficult, I think.
I do other 3D factory/sim games fine (like Dyson Sphere Program or Cities Skylines or hybrid transportation games), but IMO the stacking of shapez 2 is more a gimmicky distraction than an actually enjoyable element. It's really annoying having to route things in different levels because the UI doesn't make it easy to see what is happening. Instead of natural ramps like in other games you have these elevators and anchors that are hard to control.
Looks very polished, also glad to see a launch with a mac build.
I'd love a write up from the devs on how these type of games are built. I understand arcade style games, but not how you write structs to support these types of games.
It looks very challenging to design and program by the sheer amount of stuff happening in real time, and the careful balance of gameplay. Then again I could be completely outdated and it's not a technological feat in today's standards.
> Looks very polished, also glad to see a launch with a mac build.
And it's definitely great! I just hope they get a universal build soon, as if you are on Apple Silicon (M1+), the game runs under Rosetta. There's a bit of a performance hit because of this, although you can still run really high resolution (5K) on low fairly effortlessly! And it looks absolutely beautiful.
Side note, I was a tiny bit confused about the "tutorial" when you get the two checkboxes, one of them saying something like "Don't destroy buildings".
I thought it meant you should reuse your structures and not destroy them, which after a few milestones is just not possible at all.
Performance on my M2 Max is pretty poor, even just in the tutorial levels. I wonder if it's a Rosetta build...? Playable on Medium-High or so but laggy on higher settings right off the bat.
(On the other hand, it also launched on GeForce Now, and is silky-smooth there.)
It is, I tried to raise it up on Steam support forum, hopefully they'll address this. Especially since they showed the game a few times running on M1+ macs, I definitely was surprised.
> Performance on my M2 Max is pretty poor
On my M1 Ultra I found reducing to the "Low" preset worked great and lets me play at 60 FPS/5K resolution. It still looks fine. Just avoid Minimal which is visually jarring (no shaders and extreme contrasts/bad readability).
Liking it so far, although the 'task' progression isn't my favorite. Feels like there are way too many tasks to do that seem like tedious busywork.
Honestly a really simple game design fix for this would be to unlock tasks more slowly as the player demonstrates more engagement with the system. That way if you are like me and mostly find them boring and repetitive, you don't feel as bad about not getting them done.
From what I have seen, there are the main tasks (of which there are generally only 2 active at once), and side tasks. New side tasks unlock as you complete each tier of main tasks, and seem to be a mix between teaching different useful patterns you will need and something to do while waiting for the main tasks to finish.
I hit some sound issues in the Linux version, for anyone else with the same problem telling Steam to use Proton to run the Windows version instead is a workaround.
My only minor peeve with the sequel so far is that the logistics of moving stuff back to the central platform is pretty fiddly and time-consuming compared to the first one. I think there's an unlockable upgrade I'm nowhere near getting which might fix that though.
Yup, I too had issues with sound, the game seems to just use the first sound interface available, but it is relatively easy to change after starting (via KDE sound panel for me, but I imagine pavucontol should also work). The issue seems to be with Unity/FMOD on linux not the actual game. Newer versions of Unity seem to not have this issue and author was saying they are trying to see if they can upgrade.
PS I was attempting to make a pipewire LUA script that would auto connect the FMOD output to default interface but got stuck on querying and linking audio ports and interfaces, if someone has more Pipewire-Fu I am all ears!
Before paying up, keep in mind the bait-and-switch played on people with version one. Anyone without a Steam account is stuck with an old version when it required a Steam account after launch.
Unfortunate but not exactly deceptive, because the developer did provide a free Steam key for whoever bought the game in other platforms. I for example got one from my initial itch.io purchase. I did have been told that such requests were rare enough due to the low sales on other platforms IIRC, which is probably why it's no longer available elsewhere.
I wasn't made aware that I'd eventually be required to use a third-party store to use what I paid for. Since I don't use steam I no longer have what I paid for.
I think the exact version of shapez.io you and I bought elsewhere never went away, only the future versions would be available in Steam, so while you may feel like it you should be able to play the game itself.
>Before paying up, keep in mind the bait-and-switch played on people with version one. Anyone without a Steam account is stuck with an old version when it required a Steam account after launch.
I'm not sure what the problem is that you're describing.
To be clear it's an early access release, although as far as I can tell it's very high quality early access, with a lot of polish and heaps of features.
They get all these people around the world making complicated painted shapes which they can then use for their own nefarious purposes.
Joking aside, governments don’t only do things they can directly gain from, they sponsor or subsidise various activities which they believe are beneficial (eg in this case strengthening a domestic software or games industry seems like the sort of thing a government might spend some grant money to do).
BTW for people who like these sort of factory genre games, shapez2 is really great in my opinion, and for an early access title, performance has been silky smooth for me so far even in quite large factories although I haven’t got to real megafactory status yet.
Germany wants to strengthen their game industry by giving grants to game developers. Since 2019, 550 projects were partly funded by the government. [1]
What is the motivator of the primary gameplay loop? If I never have to make a hard decision on how to use an earned resource then it devalues my autonomy.