Hey everyone!

Before we get into this progress devlog, I, the tobspr team and everyone else involved with Shapez 2 would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and an amazing 2024. It's been a wild year and we’re super proud of what we have achieved so far. We can't wait to show parts of it to you with the upcoming demo!

We will be taking some time off these holidays, but we’ll be back next year to deliver you the Shapez 2 Demo to everyone in February. More news on this next year!

If you’d like to stay up to date with all the news and development of Shapez 2, be sure to wishlist and follow the game here on Steam! It helps us out a ton. Click the button below or click here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/



To celebrate the season, we're giving away a set of Shapez Cookie Cutters! They're brand new and not yet available anywhere else, so this is your chance to be among the first to build your shape production line in your kitchen. Catapults not included.




You'll need to have Shapez 2 wishlisted in order to participate. Once you have, be sure to check out the list of other actions you can do to gain more entries and increase your odds of winning! All actions will support us directly.

The winner will be contacted at the beginning of next year.




Two weeks ago, we released the original Shapez on mobile devices! The game features all the content of the PC version up to level 20. You can play the first 7 levels at no cost at all. The full game is available for $4.99/€4.99.

Watch the trailer:



Find the game on your preferred platform:




We released Alpha 15 this week, which features all changes mentioned in this progress devlog. Additionally, the Shapez 2 Demo is very nearly finished, barring any bug reports and feedback we get.

If you’d like to help us test the game and get early access to our latest development on Shapez 2, consider subscribing to our Patreon!

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We added sound effects to every building in the game to match their animations! You have to pan your camera quite close to the building to really hear it, but even if it’s just a faint sound, it adds a lot of life to the machines and makes this space factory game feel a bit more realistic. Looking forward to everyone experiencing the new sounds!

What do you mean, there’s no sound in space?


We’ve re-reviewed the content on the tutorial and made some changes to make hints more compact, yet efficient. They should be a lot more clear and easier to follow!

Buildings will now automatically rotate to fit the direction of the belt or building it’s being attached to. This will make placing buildings require less actions, but manually rotating may still be required in certain configurations.



Tips are now shown more prominently for a few seconds, so they’re less easy to miss. Of course, you can turn tips off if you don’t need them.



The prediction icons are now always shown on unconnected belts & building ends, as well as vortex inputs. This functions both as an indicator of what shape is being made, and a reminder that you still have work to do!



In addition to a previous change that automatically places splitters when connecting belts, this function now also applies to attaching buildings to a belt. Merging in this fashion is still being worked on.



We improved the shape visualization and shapes now also have their LODs, the latter of which will both improve performance and make them more readable from a distance. Generally, more LODs have been added to pretty much everything. LODs are neat.

We made some changes to Rotators to make them more visually distinct from processing buildings. This comes down to applying the visual language we discussed in Devlog 013. Further changes for the Rotators will come at a later date.



Placement indicators for half destroyers, full cutters and halve swappers have been improved. Their functionality and direction are now more clear and should prevent the unnecessary frustration of placing blueprints the wrong way around.



The Vortex received a number of changes. Have a look!



In general, a lot of small tweaks and improvements were made across the board in preparation for 2024.



We’ve made lots of performance improvements and the game should now run a lot more smoothly – especially on lower-end systems. You can expect an increase in FPS of up to 200%! We expect Shapez 2 to run stable on hardware as low as Intel UHD Graphics with the right settings.

We added a shader quality setting and added shaders for the lower settings.

Map generation has been vastly improved in terms of performance, with improved loading times and reducing stutter when moving around the map quickly.


New music tracks have been added. The vibes are immaculate.

We also added more interface sound effects, plus a setting to mute the audio when the game is not focused (you clicked outside the game window).


The game now uses ‘physical keys’ for keybinding. For the users of QWERTY keyboards, nothing will change. However, users of other keyboard layouts will no longer have to start the game off rebinding all the keys. The game now uses the physical location of the key to determine the default keybindings instead of the letter itself. For example, for AZERTY keyboards the game will now default to ZQSD instead of WASD for camera movement.

General improvements to UI and UI readability have been made, including conflict indicators, miner placement indicators, additional tooltips and several easy-access ways to get to various menus. You’ll also get a little popup dialogue when finishing the demo.



We added a feedback button to the game that will redirect you to the Shapez 2 Discord server, where you can easily provide us your feedback in the dedicated channel.

Belt catapults now show clearly when they’re not properly connected to the Vortex. They also delete belts in between a catapult and the receiver whenever they’re placed on a belt.



The main menu has seen several improvements and it’s looking amazing, if we say so ourselves! You can find a preview on YouTube below:

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That’s it for now. It’s a bit of a shorter one as there are no big ticket new additions this time around. We’re very happy with the current state of the Shapez 2 demo and are super excited to let you all play Shapez 2 for the first time in February. Stay tuned for news on that soon!

If you’d like to give us a Christmas present, we’d really appreciate it if you could add Shapez 2 to your wishlist. That’s all we want this year!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2162800/shapez_2/

For now, we’re gonna enjoy our holiday break and we’ll be back with another devlog next year!

~ Tobias & the shapez 2 team


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Kick off the festive period with Football Manager 2024 now 10% off on PC/Mac*.

This promotion is only applicable to FM24 (Steam/Epic/Microsoft Store) and runs until 3pm GMT on Wednesday, 27th December.



Prove yourself season after season in FM24, taking control of the world’s biggest clubs and dominating football’s biggest competitions.

Whether you start in one of Europe’s elite leagues or take on a new challenge with the fully licensed J-League, as manager you make all the key decisions about your club’s future.

Showcase your skills in the transfer market and watch your vision come to life in our best-looking match engine yet.

*This sale does not include FM24 Mobile, FM24 Touch and FM24 Console.

Helperbot here again with some more news!

As per the E-Corp™ Hibernal Hibernation Protocol, I have scheduled a much needed rest period in our ever-developing interstellar journey! The intergalactic game developer, Isaac, and his crew, Iceberg Interactive, are temporarily signing off from the 22nd of December, 2023 for a brief intermission, set to resume their work on new stellar updates and blogs starting in January.

As we navigate the cosmos, we hope your interactive adventures will reach new frontiers, and that you'll share your extraterrestrial achievements with us when we return. We encourage you to share your joy with other explorers on our proprietary Discord server as well.

May your holidays be filled with cosmic joy and wonder. Let us embark on a spacefaring start to the upcoming year together!

We are excited to see you again, travellers.

Safe Travels,
Helperbot




To stay up to date join our Discord, and of course, tell your friends about Minicology!



Minicology

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- Fixed a memory leak
- Fixed Shuffle Button with a Piece in hand, Piece is now put down and shuffled

Hello everybody! Let’s give Tymon a break this time – I’m Rafał Polito, Techland’s Technology Producer. I’m mainly involved in creating and maintaining tools used by our developers. One of my current focuses is also on user-generated content (UGC). My goal is making sure that content creation is as easily accessible as possible, not only for developers but also for gamers.

We’re very lucky to have a community that’s really creative, and this ingenuity naturally lends itself to building maps. But usually it’s more or less a niche interest, available only to those who dig deep into dev functionalities – both for the game creators and those who like to play them. This is why I’ve spent hundreds of hours buried in developer tools to make them more approachable for our players. On top of that, we partnered with mod.io, which was a huge step in terms of opening UGC up to a wider audience. Now, you can access the maps by just pressing a button in the main menu, on PC and consoles alike.



But that’s playing, what about the creating part of the equation? Our (and mine, personally) never-ending love for UGC and teaching other people resulted in the first ever Community Workshops related to our Community Maps project! We invited top creators from all over the world to our headquarters in Wrocław to pass on our knowledge, discuss, brainstorm, and learn about their expectations regarding the future of Developer Tools and UGC.

We are always #CommunityFirst, which we work hard to show in our daily actions and relationships we aim to build. Social media exchanges and meet-ups are great, but I’d like to take it a step further and interact with the members of our community in a tangible and productive way. This is why the goal of the workshops was to equip our guests with the literal and metaphorical tools for them to grow as creators – show them a way that could lead to becoming developers. We know some of them see a future in gamedev, so it’s really fantastic to be able to watch their work, how passionate and meticulous they are.

Me with our 9 happy workshoppers:

The workshop crew, in alphabetical order: bub, Crex, Hank_Hill, HENeral, Liliannismo33, SrgRespawn, TheAhmetIbrahim, X_0, XAndUkarE + me

So, what exactly went into these workshops? For two full days, the top map creators had an opportunity to meet and talk to the developers in our office, particularly to Techland’s Developer Tools team.

Our devs were all praise:
“I was surprised and excited to see that our guests had unique backgrounds and skills, suited to working in different areas and with diverse features. They gave the impression of one, united team that had been creating games of their own for years. Sometimes, I felt that they knew more about our tools than I do, or our developers! I also had a feeling that we’d known each other forever, even if our previous communication was only online.”

During the first part of the workshops, we focused on theory: what goes into designing a good map, and what aspects are extremely important to make it successful. For example, it turns out you don’t have to create a painstakingly perfect 20-hour-long scenario for people to want to play it. Sometimes, all it takes is a cool idea for 5 minutes of fun – if it’s executed well. We also had a discussion about the specific projects created by our community members and studied each case separately. Additionally, we discussed a few tips and tricks on how to save time and maximize results.
Engrossed in map creation:



The second part was all about practice – our guests had to pick a random idea and inspiration, lottery style. Here are some examples:
Pitch black: make a map where the infection progress is the primary threat;
Gravity: make a map where a different gravity setting is the main gimmick;
Picturesque: make a map where visual beauty is the main focus.

Then, we moved on to the game jam stage, when they got to create new maps. What followed was a conversation about individual progress and an idea sharing session. Towards the end of the day, we entered into brainstorming mode. We talked about Developer Tools, the future of this feature, and how to improve tools for the community. We showed some sneak peeks of upcoming updates, like mod support or new features in DevTools to support mod creation. We even showed our legendary City Builder, most requested by the community – but, in my opinion, it’s too complex and too big even for our developers to handle and so will remain our secret tool.

Just look what beauties our dev tools can help create*:

* Photo contains a screengrab of a map made by one of the creators that is work in progress and does not occur in game – image not representative of final quality.

Let’s take a look at what one of our guests had to say about the entire experience:
“The crew was awesome, very fun, charismatic, and positive people around. The plan for workshops was great, we had time to explore, time to chat, time to work and focus, then relax by the end of the day. The integration with other community map creators itself was something I think we all needed. There wasn't a moment where I felt lost.”

We strongly believe that community is the most important aspect of Dying Light. Meeting up with our map creators was a joy, an honor, and an inspiration all at the same time. Personally, I think that initiatives like the Community Workshops are the best thing that can come out of this symbiotic relationship between Techland and the folks that like our games enough to dedicate hours of their time to poke around the technical aspects. A lot of respect goes out to them and I hope we’ll be able to have a repeat experience next year. Let us know what you think about it on our reddit channel. To find more information on Community Maps, visit the dedicated area of Pilgrim Outpost. Who knows, maybe you’ll get inspired to create one as well!

Take care!

Nobody likes cheaters. We’re continuing to actively fight them — and we want to thank those who are actively helping us on this matter. The number of violations identified and banned recently has significantly increased — and with it of course the integrity of all battles!

Over the last month, we’ve blocked 6,818 accounts that were found to be in violation of the rules. Specifically 3.2.3 of the EULA namely in the automation of gameplay (using bots) and cheat software.

For full transparency, we’re publishing the full list of these blocked players. This list will be available for two weeks after the publication of this article.

We recommend that you set a strong password for your account and enable two-step authentication in your profile. This will protect your account from fraudsters. And remember, don’t use forbidden client modifications and never share your account information with anyone!

Hello Heroes,

The year is ending and the holidays are approaching, we wanted to thank you for your support thoughout the year and with the 1.0 Launch in March. The Last Spell would not have been the same without you and we are truly grateful for your support, comments and feedback that you share in every possible places.

Being able to have a look into your gameplay, to know what's working for you and what's not is always immensely motivating. Especially when we are looking to balance stuff out and we need to confirm we are on the right path! Beta players, we see you.

For the 1.0 Launch, we were very happy to work on an awesome 2D animated trailer! Not only did this trailer bring out the best in The Last Spell, but it was also so extremely satisfying for us to see our baby project grow into this, thank you CRCR and Wizz for your work on the animation!


Recently, we also surpassed the 95% threshold of Recent Positive Reviews on Steam: thank you for that!

As promised, in 2024 the first DLC of The Last Spell will release and we cannot wait to share more information with you! Right now, it's all pretty secretive but we are hard at work! Everything will be revealed... soon!

We wish you the best for your holidays, may your end of the year be filled with lovely moments with absolutely zero monsters and no stupid mages to ruin your Nights.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1105670/The_Last_Spell/

As always, thank you for your support, you can join us on Discord, Twitter & Instagram to chat with the team and other players!

As this year draws to a close, we are settling down a little and looking back on an eventful year with many highlights:



We started this year by releasing the Console Edition and a free update for everyone. At the same time, the Deluxe Upgrade, the first expansion for Transport Fever 2, was released. From what we have read and heard, you seem to have just as much fun playing with the additional content as we had creating it.

In the summer, we had a second highlight, which was entirely thanks to you: Transport Fever 2 now has more than one million players across the globe! This is a significant achievement for us, and we are deeply grateful for your continued support and enthusiasm. Making games is great, but making games for a community like ours makes it even more fulfilling. Besides this great news, Urban Games also celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Neither of both would have been possible without you!

As already announced in our last post, this was not the last year of Transport Fever 2. We will release one more game update next year. More information about this will follow during the next few months.

The entire team at Urban Games wishes you beautiful and healthy holidays and a happy new year!