shapez 2 – Demo Learnings & Extension

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