Hey guys!

I thought it'd be worth to make a separate post on what I'm currently working on and what is on my mind. (Probably will do more dev-logs in the future).

First of all - I will be in vacation until Monday, 22th. I won't respond on discord, steam, reddit and E-Mail. Hope you will survive that! :P (This also means no daily updates within that time - sorry!)

Now that we have the bad news out, here's what I am planning with the new wires update!



So, I had a lot of thoughts about how to make the game more interesting late-game and came up with this wires idea:

Once you complete level 18 (Goals until there will be lowered, so you reach it quicker), you unlock a separate layer where you can put wires on.

You will then be able to switch between the "default" layer (with the buildings) and the "wires" layer (Containing the wires connected to the buildings). Imagine a circuit board where you have the transitsors (=buildings) on one side, and the wiring on the other.


Here is a draft on how it could look:




Features I can imagine:
- Levers on the regular layer which emit an "on"/"off" signal to the wires layer
- Connecting wires to a balancer for example allows you to enable/disable inputs of it
- Maybe there would be special "power sources" which can be connected to buildings to vastly speed them up?
- Maybe you could read items from a belt?
- Maybe you could read the current goal from the hub?
- And/Or/Not gates in the wires layer

There are lots of potential ideas but I still haven't found a really good use case. The only one I can imagine currently is building a make-everything factory which you can then customize via levers.

So, I need your ideas guys! Join the Discord Server and leave your suggestions and feedback in the #wires channel!


I always try to be as transparent as possible with the community, and right now I consider an upcoming price change, once the the wires update will be out.

Since I am in close contact to the community, I have actually made a survey regarding this on the Discord Server and I highly recommend you to parcitipate!

PS: shapez.io will NOT be on the steam summer sale! This is because the game is too fresh and is not even allowed to have a discount 30 days after launching. So, it is unlikely that there will be a sale within the next 2 months at least!

Many people complained that placing straight (long) belts is currently hard, and this update addresses this!

You can now hold SHIFT (configurable) while placing a belt to activate the belt planner. It will try to connect the point you drag from to your cursor and place the belts once you release your cursor. You can right click or release SHIFT to cancel it.

I experimented with automatic orientation, but in the end I decided to make it flipable manually by pressing 'R' - Really looking forward to your feedback on this!




- Added continue button to main menu and add seperate 'New game' button (by jaysc)
- Added setting to disable smart tunnel placement introduced with the last update (Since it can produce unwanted side effects)
- Added setting to disable vignette
- Update translations (Big thanks to all translators!)



I will create another post today containing my ideas about circuits and how I plan to continue with the game - stay prepared!

Hey there!

I just pushed another update with a lot of cool stuff!


Markers now are way cooler! First of all, the HUB Marker now shows a compass once your hub is no longer visible:



But even better: You can now include short keys in the markers which will render as a shape!



Explanation: Short keys are a way of describing how a shape looks. For example, the shapes above are called "CgScScCg" and "RpRpRpRp:CwCwCwCw" - If you are interested in more details, check out the Shapez.io Viewer which is a tool to generate and view the shapes!

If you enter a short key as a marker name, it will automatically render it everywhere - Isn't that cool!?


So, many people were asking about mirroring buildings, and the main problem here was the painter - Which is why I added a mirrored variant! I feel like this should be enough and there is no further need for mirroring then - Let me know what you think! (It is unlocked the whole time)





When placing tunnels, the game is now much smarter about that! An image says more than a thousand words, so lemme show it off:



They will automatically remove unused belts inbetween now and you can now drag them properly!



PS: 1.1.13 was a minor update which only updated translations, which is why I didn't post about that :)

Awesome news - the game will now run up to 60% faster!

I spent my whole Sunday on tweaking the performance of the game, especially regarding belts. The biggest improvement was caching the connections between buildings by precomputing a dependency graph.

This allows me to perform a lot of calculations when you place/remove a building and not doing it every tick! (Should have done that earlier, but I simply didn't get to it).

So, this is only one part of a huge series of performance improvements I have planned - But it should already run much smoother now!

PS: This only affects the tick-rate. The rendering remains unchanged, but optimizations there are planned too. However, the tick-rate is the major part which potentially causes lag.

PPS: Performance improvements and refactorings always have big potential to break stuff - Please report anything suspicious in the discord! :)

PPPS: Looking forward to insanely big mega factories now!

PPPPS: If you're a C++ guy you'll know why I used the affix and not the suffix on the announcement cover ;)


I also just released the "tobspr's Strategy Game Bundle"! It includes all my strategy games:
- YORG.io
- YORG.io 3
- shapez.io

If you enjoyed shapez.io, you should definitely have a look, and its also a great way to support me!

Check it out here: tobspr's Strategy Game Bundle



Have a nice remaining Sunday!
~ Tobias

Hey guys!

Finally got the 1.1.11 update out (Thats a lot of '1'!), which includes a lot of minor changes as well as quality of live improvements!

Additionally it includes 3 user contributions, so let me go through all changes!


When you pinned a shape, the shape plus the required amount was saved and stored in the left side. This led to several issues, mainly the goal not updating or shapes not being removed when no longer being required.

This update fixes it: When you pin a shape, only the shape is saved. The required amount then is automatically computed, depending if its required for an upgrade or the next level.

Once the shape is not required anymore (Thus, for no upgrade and not for the next level as well), it will automatically unpin.

Finally, once you have reached the required amount on a given shape, it will render transparent, so you know which shapes are already completed.


You can now cut areas with 'X' once you have blueprints unlocked! Also, you can now paste the last blueprint with 'V'. This is a huge quality of live improvement!

Notice that there is one issue: Cutting will actually cost blueprint shapes, so moving buildings will actually cost something. I'm considering to make this free, just letting you know so you are not confused.

This has been added by hexy - thanks a lot!


This is a standalone only feature - You can now press F3 to export your whole base as an image! This can be used to generate super cool images of mega-bases! Just like this one here (Click to view full resolution):





This is a standalone only feature as well - There were a lot of complaints about belts not being compressed even if they should. For example:



This is caused by the dynamic tick-rate. The game automatically reduces the precision the bigger your base gets, to make sure it still does run somewhat smooth. Additionally, transferring items from a belt to a building and vice-versa always needs at least one tick - if your ticks are too low, this can be the bottleneck.

Since there is no possibility of fixing this while maintaining good performance, I now gave you the choice - You can now select the 500hz simulation target in the settings to make sure your simulation is super precise! (And slow, and will burn your pc ...)

• Improved upgrade number rounding, so there are no goals like '37.4k', instead it will now be '35k'
  
• You can now configure the camera movement speed when using WASD (by mini-bomba)
  
• Selecting an area now is relative to the world and thus does not move when moving the screen (by Dimava)
  
• Fix bug regarding number rounding
  
• Fix dialog text being hardly readable in dark theme
  
• Fix app not starting when the savegames were corrupted - there is now a better error message as well.
  
• Further translation updates - Big thanks to all contributors!

There is a lot of stuff ongoing! Currently I'm trying to find the best way for unlocking blueprints. I'm running a survey in the discord right now and I recommend you to parcitipate! (Click to join the discord)



Be sure to also check out the Roadmap Overview!

Hey guys!

So, I spent some time on getting the linux builds to work and just published them!

Please give me feedback if everything works properly, because admittedly I'm not a linux expert! :) (So, even if everything works, feel free to leave me a message in the #feedback discord channel so I know everything is good!)

While I was on it, I figured it would be easy to also integrate steam cloud saves - so those are also available in this update now!

Besides of that, I'm currently working on a fix for broken savegames, this has the following reason:

- The game saves your progress automatically and asynchronous, to make sure it doesn't lag
- This process can (especially on larger bases) take up to 5 seconds or more.
- If you exit the game within that time, the write-process will be disrupted and thus you will end up with a corrupt file
- Unfortunately its not possible to restore the file, once corrupted.

The fix here is to implement a mechanism which many programs already have: Write a secondary file, and once written rename it to the original file. This ensures that the content is written as whole.

It's not easy to integrate and takes some time, but I'm giving my best!

Be sure to also check the Roadmap Announcement to see what I'll be working on!

PS: If you are interested in helping with the translations, check out the Translations on GitHub!

PPS: Northernlion played shapez.io! This is so cool! Check out the video


PPPS: I'm so overwhelmed by all this positive feedback! Love you guys! (And I can hardly keep up, please don't be mad if I don't respond instantly!)

Hey guys!

First of all, HUGE thanks to this insane crazy positive feedback towards the game! Steam is currently even featuring the game on the front page and there has not been a single negative review yet!

This is really overwhelming and I'm super motivated on pushing out updates to improve the game! I have a lot planned, be sure to check out the roadmap post! :)

So, lets get to the actual content - I used my free day today for an 1.1.9 update:

TRANSLATION SUPPORT

The game is now available in different languages! For now there are English, French, Portuguese, Czech and Spanish (Latin America) - But everybody can contribute!

If you would like to help out, you can check out the documentation here:
Translations on GitHub


FURTHER CHANGES

This update only includes a few small adjustments and fixes - I need more time for a big content update (Hopefully this weekend!).

- Update stacker artwork to clarify how it works
- Update keybinding hints on the top left to be more accurate
- Make it more clear when blueprints are unlocked when trying to use them
- Fix pinned shape icons not being visible in dark mode
- Fix being able to select buildings via hotkeys in map overview mode
- Make shapes unpinnable in the upgrades tab (By hexy)


Big thanks to all of you for this amazing support!

Hey guys!

First of all, thank you for all the positive feedback on the game! I really appreciate it and it shows me that this game has potential, as well as motivating me to push it even further!

I am trying to be in constant contact with the community (you!), especially on discord - I'm usually available there the whole day and trying to respond to everything (Although this can get hard at some point).

I'm also doing surveys there (Like the circuit survey) - So I really recommend to join the discord if you want to know whats going on!

I also appreciate all the pull requests I am getting (Those are community contributions), although there are just too many - Reviewing and testing them takes time, and not every PR does add an immediate value, and might even break the game. So - I'm trying to catch up, but please notice that it might take a long time until your PR is merged / commented on! :)

So, getting to the point - Here are my plans on what I want to implement. Not all of those are finished ideas and might drastically change, but I thought it'd be worth mentioning so you can see how this game will evolve!

PS: If you are interested in more details, check out the Trello Page - It also lists known bugs and stuff.

PS2: I'm working on the game in my free time (I still have a full-time job) - This means it will take some time for everything to be implemented and updates will take a bit longer. I'm trying to keep you constantly updated though! My long term goal is to be able to work on shapez.io full time.



This is a topic which I suggested and which so far has received over 200 votes (The highest voted survey in the shapez.io history).




This definitely will be fun to implement! I plan to add wires at a late state of the game, where you have most things unlocked - So this is actually a huge feature which will only affect a minority of players, but I still think its super cool!



There are several buildings I can imagine, but its really difficult to add new buildings - Every building could potentially break the game or make it less fun actually.

Things I'm considering:
- Compact 1 to 2 balancer (Alternatively compact 1 to 3, and replace the two 2 to 1 mergers with a single 3 to 1 merger to reduce amount of variants)
- 3x1 / 4x1 stacker
- De-stacker (Somebody already made a PR)

This is not a complete list and there is no guarantee that any of the above mentioned buildings will make it into the game! Still, I thought I'd share with you what I am considering so far.


Right now the game is unplayable as soon as you have to mix colors. I want to make it accessible to everybody and thus there is the need for a color blind mode.
This is a super difficult topic, and I still haven't figured out on how to solve it in an elegant way. (Ideas appreciated!)



Right now there is only one mode, and one could call it the "Sandbox" mode - no costs for buildings and no restrictions on how many you can place (Except for blueprints).

I plan to add a seperate story mode where every building has a cost (The cost will be a certain shape) - I definitely need to try out how this feels when playing it!


I think it would be super cool to be able to influence the map generation - Share seeds with friends, control which shapes appear on the map and in which density.


So, this is a big topic. I haven't decided yet on how I want to distribute the mods, but seeing the amount of contributions on github I can imagine a lot of potential mods! This is something I'm still planning (I also need to do some research on how the steam workshop works).


This is a difficult one, since every shape part needs to be stackable on others. People have already created more shapes in their self-built versions of the game, but those partially don't stack well (They look super cool though!).


So, this is just a super small list of what I am planning so far! I did miss a lot of stuff for sure. However, trying to keep you updated and I'm looking forward to your feedback!

shapez.io will launch on steam on the 7th of June - Be sure to add it to your wishlist!

The steam version will be and stay feature equal with the itch.io version for a while - I don't want to give people a disadvantage for buying it on itch.io. This doesn't mean I don't have plans for integrating steam achievements or cloud saves though :)

Looking forward to your responses and I hope you'll enjoy the game!