shapez 2 - What to expect from Early Access

Before shapez 2 releases on August 15 (that’s less than a week!) I wanted to do a personal post about the history of shapez 2 and what to expect during early access. We’ve been super transparent in the development process so far, and thus I thought it would be a great opportunity!

This post is a bit longer, but I tried to include a bunch of images and interesting insights! If you'd like to skip to the Early Access expectations part, click here .

TL;DR

• Shapez 2 releases August 15, 13:00 CEST

• It should be polished & enjoyable and basically bug-free

• No roadmap; Instead we will survey after the release what you want us to actually work on

• First update might take a few months

Why shapez 2?

Back in early 2021, I was struggling to come up with new ideas for content and updates in shapez 1. The game loop felt very closed, all new ideas evolved around adding more complex shape mechanics at the end of the game, which would only benefit a fraction of the playerbase. Popular mods like shapez industries did exactly that, but they also heavily modified the early game already, which I didn’t want to change (as I felt it was already in a good place - except for blueprints being a bit late).

Performance was a frequent complaint, but there was nothing left to optimize. Shapez 1 is written in JavaScript, so it’s literally just a website. There is no support for efficient rendering, memory management or proper multithreading and the language itself is at least a magnitude slower than C++ or C#. If you look at it from this perspective, it’s actually quite insane how well the game runs up to a certain scale.

These were just a few of the factors that led me to the conclusion to focus on something new, instead of adding more content and features to the first game. Now that shapez had shown huge promise (which, by the way, was totally unexpected!) my goal was to now do it “properly” with a real engine and build a base that could be expanded for many years.

Due to personal reasons it took me a bit longer to actually start, but back in July 2022 I wrote the first line of code for shapez 2, without any clue how it’d eventually turn out.

Researching

As during that time a lot of sequels couldn’t deliver on the expectations, I was very worried and careful to make sure we build a great sequel that is both liked by existing players and potential new players. While this sometimes meant going for less experimental changes, I think we found a great compromise by now.

To determine what defines a “shapez” game, I did a survey in the shapez 1 Discord server. I wanted to avoid changing the essential things that made shapez stand out in the first place:

The results showed me what to keep and expand on, as well which mechanics we could probably exchange or get rid of entirely. For example, only 18% of players voted for the complex shape mechanics that are introduced in level 20. I never really liked the mechanic in the first place, and so we decided to remove it and add more intuitive mechanics instead.

Additionally, I wanted to find out what new features could be exciting for a sequel:

These surveys immensely helped us to determine what to focus on. If you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve implemented almost