Shapez2 Released
shapez2.com
shapez2.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kudos for such a polished release and launch!
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.
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 Then again I could be completely outdated and it's not a technological feat in today's standards.
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).
I'm just grateful the devs also put it on GFN on launch day, where it's playable at 120 fps at ultra settings.
Think I still prefer the simpler 2D graphics of the first game, though... it was charming :)
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.
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.
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!
I wish my PCB/schematic editor was half this easy to use.
I'm not sure what the problem is that you're describing.
Is there educational content?
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.