Hey everyone! First of all, I want to apologize for the late devlog. A lot of stuff is happening right now, and it's hard to find time in between!

News

We are slowly growing the team - last week we welcomed Lorenzo who will help with the Development, so there are now 5 people working full time on shapez 2!

New Soundtrack

Shapez 2 will ship with 40 minutes of soundtrack from Petter Sumelius, the composer who also made the amazing shapez 1 soundtrack! Additionally, there will be a supporter edition that will add additional 40 minutes of soundtrack to the game, composed by Petter as well!

Wishlist shapez 2

Be sure to wishlist & follow shapez 2, so you get a notification on any significant updates! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/ And if you want to try out the current alpha, be sure to join the shapez 2 discord!

Devlog - Research, Progression & Blueprints

Please note: A lot of content shown here is subject to change. While we are already satisfied with the new research system, we can not guarantee it will end up exactly like this in the final game.

Recap - shapez 1

In shapez 1 you had a linear level system, where you had to deliver one certain shape to complete the level and unlock the next technology. Additionally there were 4 different upgrades where you could increase the speed of buildings.
While efficient, this system leads to some issues. First of all, having a purely linear structure means that even if the next level contains a building / technology you don't need or want, you still have to unlock it to progress. Additionally, it means that the replayability is not really good, because every playthrough looks exactly the same, without a lot of meaningful choices. Which is why for shapez 2, wanted to rework the system.

What we tried - and didn't work

Our first approach making a big research tree. There was a "main" goal section in the middle, but otherwise it was just all research nodes in one single tree:
(The image is quite large, you can click to enlarge it) However, during playtesting, it showed that this was way too confusing. It was almost impossible to figure out which upgrades to go for next, which ones were more important or even required, and which not. Thus, we decided that we needed to go for a hybrid approach instead.

New approach - Categorizing upgrades

To make the upgrades easier to understand, we started separating them into 3 different categories:

Milestones

Milestones are upgrades that unlock new technologies which allow you to produce new types of shapes. These upgrades are required for the progression within the game and can not be skipped, for example painting shapes. Milestones are supposed to be large goals you work towards for a while, while also pursuing other goals in the meantime since they can take a while to complete. Basically we went over all upgrades and asked the question "Will the game experience be bad if the player doesn't unlock this?". For the current alpha, we already ended with 14 milestones, although we plan to add a lot more content, even for the early access release.

QoL Upgrades

Quality-of-life upgrades are upgrades like the storage, counter-clockwise rotator, decorations, labels and so on. These are upgrades that you can go for if desired, and they can make a lot of sense for your factory, but they are not required to progress in the game. Thus, you have a lot more choice if and when during your playthrough you want to unlock them.

"Flat" Upgrades

Flat upgrades are upgrades like Belt Speed, Platform Limit, HUB Size which just have different tiers (i.e. Belt Speed 1, Belt Speed 2, ...). Those upgrades are supposed to be infinite, but we haven't figured this out exactly yet.

Organizing the upgrades

To connect the upgrades together in the research UI, we started with a linear progression at the top. We put the milestones in a linear order, which is very similar to the levels system in shapez 1.
Then we started categorizing the QoL and Flat upgrades into different categories like Transport, Processing, Fluids and so on. Each category got their own little tech-tree, in which you can unlock the QoL upgrades, as well as an area at the bottom for the flat upgrades to better separate them:
The QoL and Flat upgrades can depend on previous upgrades, as well as milestones. For example, if a QoL upgrade requires red circles, it will most likely depend on the "Painting" milestone. This is also shown so you have an idea which shapes you can already produce, and which ones need new technologies first.
You can also pin all upgrades to your screen to track them:
With this change, you now have a lot more control when to unlock optional upgrades, while still having a guideline through the game progression! While we really like the new system, we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on it though!

Random Goals - Replayability

While the new system makes the replayability a little better, it's still not great. Thus, we are planning to add a "seed" to the research tree. All shapes you have to produce are then randomly generated, instead of predefined. There is a standard seed (0) which is the default research tree, but you can enter another seed to get an entirely different set of shapes. This means that whenever you want to start a new playthrough of shapez 2, you don't end up having to produce the same shape again and again, but instead every time it's a new one! Additionally, this also allows us to have a much better difficulty setting than just increasing the amount of required shapes for every goal: Basically, we will develop an algorithm that allows to create a shape requirement, given a set of currently available technologies and desired difficulty. The more difficult, the more steps (like cut, rotate, ...) and resources need to be chained to produce the shape. If you then play on "easy" difficulty, you will get shapes that require far less steps than on "insane". Of course, in the beginning of the game both modes will still require simple shapes (since you can't produce more complex ones) but especially in the end of the game it will be a huge difference! We hope that this makes the game a lot more replayable and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

Blueprints

A big, if not the biggest complaint in shapez 1 was that blueprints unlocked a little late. Basically the issue with blueprints is, the earlier they are unlocked, the simpler the blueprint shape needs to be (because you can't produce more complex ones at that point). For shapez 2, we wanted to change this, so we came up with the idea of blueprint points: You unlock blueprints very early, and in order to gain the blueprint points (BP), you need to deliver a certain shape which is then converted into points:
Once you unlock new milestones, you also unlock new shapes you can deliver to more efficiently generate the blueprint points:
Basically if you deliver the left shape, you get 1 blueprint point, whereas you get 100 if you deliver the right shape. Copying structures or islands then cost blueprint points, and exponentially more the larger the blueprint or island is:
This allows us to make blueprints available a lot earlier, but still having interesting blueprint shapes later in the game! Let us know what you think about this as well! PS: There will also be a blueprint library - you can already share and load blueprint strings in the current alpha, but we want to make it easy to also create collections of blueprints, store them, share them and so on! But more on that in another devlog!

Wishlist & Follow Shapez 2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/ Have a nice remaining weekend, and I hope you enjoyed reading the devlog! ~Tobias