Hey guys!

I'm sorry for not writing a devlog for about two weeks, I have been super busy in real life because I'm currently moving and also have a lot to do on my main job!


I have been working on changing the way to provide feedback, since I got overwhelmed by the amount of suggestions and feedback (I get like 300 messages a day ...).

So, here is how I ask you to provide feedback, report bugs, submit suggestions etc etc.

I kindly ask you to start from the top and work through to the bottom, without skipping steps.

1. Ask in #bugs / #feedback / #questions on the discord server first, if you are uncertain if it is really a bug or an issue or your side, or if you want to gather the feedback of other players first for a suggestion.
   
2. Visit the Trello Board
   
3. Check if your suggestion, bug, etc is already there - If so, vote for it - Don't worry, I will see it :) (You have to be signed in on trello).
   
4. If not, check if it's already reported on the GitHub issues page
   
5. If it's not reported there, create a new issue here
   
6. I will then have a look (This can take days or weeks) and convert it to trello, and comment with the link. You can then vote there ;)

I hope this makes it easier for both sides! It might sound confusing at first, but it saves me a lot of work! :)

PS: You can of course still submit feedback etc. on the steam discussion board. Just notice that I check that very irregulary and it might take some time for me to respond, if at all.


Since there will be no minor updates until the big wires update, I'll give you a bit of a spoiler what features besides of the new content will also be in!

Notice that not all of them are already implemented (Just a few)- It's just a summary on what I plan for the update.

If you want to test some of them, you can become a beta tester by joining the discord server and checking out the #auto-roles channel.


The current balancer has a compact variant, which has two inputs and one output. This is very handy for merging outputs, but there is no equivalent for the splitter. I plan to change it from:

- Balancer (2 inputs, 2 outputs)
- Compact Balancer (2 inputs, 1 output)
- Mirrored Compact Balancer (2 inputs, 1 output)

To:

- Balancer (2 inputs, 2 outputs)
- 1x1 compact Merger (3 inputs, 1 output)
- 1x1 compact Splitter (1 input, 3 outputs)

I feel this makes more sense. I'll have to figure out how to migrate old savegames though (But I can do that! :P)


The current tier 7 upgrades are just way too fast and cause a lot of problems:
- You can not really see which items are on the belt anymore
- They can look like they go backward
- They introduce precision issues because the game can't tick that fast, so buildings and belts actually work slower than they should

So what I am planning is to scale everything down, so that the tier 7 upgrades give like a x8 speedup only or even less (Instead of x15). Obviously this would also reduce the amount of shapes required, but it should also make the whole game more balanced since you are not that heavily dependent on the upgrades (While they still are quite useful). Let me know what you think in the discord server!


This is something I can implement in an hour or less, and will hopefully provide a huge quality of live improvement. You will be able to name your savegame in the main menu then by clicking an edit button.


The stacker currently behaves buggy when creating the level 18 shape. I'll not go into details to avoid spoilers, but if you ran into any issues while creating the shapes, it should be solved then.
Notice that this has the potential to break existing factories though!


I have a lot of smaller improvements and additions on buildings which I want to get in:

- 180 degrees rotater
- Synchronize outputs of quad painter with quad cutter
- Mark preferred input on storage visually
- [Not certain yet] Maybe an unstacker building
- Building or mechanic to measure items / second on a belt
- Switching from items / minute to items / second everywhere (For example on the statistics)
- And a lot more!

You can see the whole roadmap on the Trello Board as mentioned above.

Looking forward to your feedback, and huge thanks for all the support from you ❤️!

Hey guys!

Since there was no announcement or update since a week, I thought it'd be time for a new devlog!

There are currently no updates because I am working on the huge wires update, which changes the game in a way that I can't make any minor updates until I release it. I plan to release the wires update mid/end July but that is just a rough guess!

So, I thought this post would be a good opportunity to show you what I am currently working on!

The wires update will be split into two parts: Energy and Logic. Let me go through both of them:


There will be an energy generator which produces energy from a given shape. The shapes most likely will get more complex the more generators you place - or something similar (I haven't figured out all details yet):




After supplying shapes, the energy generator will produce energy on a secondary layer, the wires layer (WIP Artwork):




There will then be multiple use cases, for now I stuck to one new building (There will come more!). The new building inverts all colors of the given shape. This gives you the ability to produce black!

Here is how the color inverter looks in a regular layer:



As you can see, there is a small battery icon, showing how much energy the building currently has stored. Currently one energy is enough to invert 4 shapes (All numbers subject to change).

Notice that every energy consumed also produces waste. You will have to feed that waste back into the energy generator, otherwise the building will stall.

Here is how a setup producing black items could look like:




There is a lot more stuff planned:

- Splitters / mergers / tunnels for wires (They'll work a bit different than the regular ones)
- Different artwork for the waste
- More buildings using power (I have a lot of ideas, stay tuned!)

Notice that this won't change the existing gameplay. It will kick in past level 18 only (You will slowly start to unlock wires after level 18, although the requirements for level 18 will be lowered).


There have been many requests on introducing logic into the game, and I also think that's what most of you think when I say "wires". So here's my concept on the logic:

- There will be logic wires, seperate from regular wires
- A logic wire can transport either a Shape, Color or Logical signal (ON/OFF)
- Logic wires are instant

So, what can you do with logic wires? Let me introduce the options you have first:


1. You will be able to place levers in the regular layer, which emit an ON / OFF SIgnal to the wires layer

2. You will be able to place AND/OR/NOT/XOR gates which work with ON / OFF Signals

3. You will be able to extract signals from buildings. For example:

- You can read what is the current required shape by connecting a logic wire to the hub

- You can read which was the last item a balancer or belt left through by connecting a logic wire to it

4. You will be able to feed signals into balancers. There will be a "filter" pin and you can put it on an input slot of a building. As soon as you connect a shape or color signal to this input, it will only accept this given shape.


5. You can work with logic shapes: You can cut, rotate, stack, de-stack, paint and unpaint them.

Example use:

You can retrieve the current required shape from the hub, figure out which shapes and colors the individual quadrants require, and then build a machine which automatically delivers the right shapes!





I am still finalizing the concept but I feel like this could be a super cool addition to the game!

Let me know what you think!

~Tobias

Hey guys!

While I was working on the wires thingy I also did a lot of performance improvements. Originally I planned to release both together, but I figured that it would be cool to already have those improvements out! (Also feels bad to have no update for a week :P)

So, this update adds huge performance improvements to your factories, which have the potential to double your fps!


I don't want to go into details, but I mainly optimized belt and tunnel performance. Previously, every belt was a single entity and managed the items on it. Now, there are belt paths which are much faster to compute since they can move items much more efficient.



As you can see, only the position to the first item on the path (The small purple rectangle) and the distance to the next item (the number shown on the right side of an item) are stored now.

To update a belt path, I can now simply reduce the distance on the last item and continue so until the whole belt has progressed (while reducing the spacing). This is much faster to update!

I also improved the performance of tunnels since I know that many of you switched to them to save performance! They should also be much faster to compute now :)

And to make it even better, rendering of belts should now also be faster due to the new system!



The shapes required until unlocking blueprints have been reduced so that you effectively unlock blueprints earlier. I am trying out those values and will see on how that works, or if further adjustment is required!

Changes:

• Level 8: 1250 -> 1000
  
• Level 9: 1750 -> 1400
  
• Level 10: 2250 -> 1600
  
• Level 11: 3000 -> 1800
  
• Level 12: 4000 -> 2000 (here you get the blueprints)

Looking forward to your feedback!


There is now a 'Copy Key' button when viewing shape information, so you can use that to create a marker from it for example.

You can now also click on a variant (like the counter clockwise rotater) with your mouse to select it.


The FPS of the belt animation has been improved, previously it would look like the belts would go backward on higher belt speeds. It should also be much smoother now :)


You can now press 'Q' over a color/shape patch to select the extractor for placement. (by Gerdon262)


Previously, the last selected rotation would be stored per building. For example. if you place a painter and then select a belt, the belt would have the same rotation initially.

Now, each building stores this rotation individually. If you dislike this behavior, you can turn it off in the settings. (by Magos)


- Fix deconstruct sound being played when right clicking hub
- Update belt placement performance on huge factories (by Phlosioneer)
- Fix duplicate waypoints with a shape not rendering (by hexy)
- Fix smart tunnel placement deleting wrong tunnels (by mordof)
- Added chinese (traditional) translation
- Updated translations



- Wires, wires, wires :D It'll be awesome!

Hey guys!

You might have been wondering why there have been no updates for 4 days (Well, never thought I'd write something like this ... :D) however that's because I am still working on the wires update plus some performance improvements!

Since this will take a while I thought it'd be cool to stream the development, so you can still see whats going on!

So, I will be streaming on https://www.twitch.tv/yorg_io occasionally now!

If you are interested on how this will look, you can also look at todays stream recording.

PS: In this stream I've been working on performance updates which have the potential to double your framerate! If you are interested on how your current savegames will perform with the update, you can already test them on the shapez.io beta (Please note that the beta will be broken regulary though).

Looking forward to meeting you in the stream!

~Tobi

You might have noticed there haven't been any updates the past two days, which is because I was very busy on working on the wires update!

I am currently running a huge survey and I would recommend you to join it!

First, read my summary and ideas about wires (spoiler!):

https://gist.github.com/tobspr/c3cbc5fd3d4d254711ec3574cf6db19d

Second, join the Discord Server and vote for the ideas in the `#surveys` channel!

I'm looking forward to your feedback!

Hey guys!


Another daily update for you! :)


It has been requested many times, and even if it might have been a minority I felt it would be unfair not work on a solution - so here it is!

There is now a "Color blind mode" setting which enables you to view the colors below your cursor:




I thought this would be a cool feature, and while mainly implemented for the color blind mode, you can now click the "info" icon on every shape to view its detailed information! This is also active without the color blind mode enabled.





You can now configure the autosave interval:




The smart tunnel placement feature has been reworked. It will now only replace the belts between two tunnels if the whole gap contains belts faced in the right direction.

If you drag the tunnels, it will still replace the belts though. I haven't found a good fix for that yet :/ (In order to implement this properly a big refactoring would be required first).


Sometimes the belts would be messed up when pasting a blueprint. This should be fixed now! (Contribution by hexy)


- The soundtrack now has a higher quality in the standalone version
- Added setting to disable warnings when cutting / deleting more than 100 buildings (by hexy)
- Fix camera moving weird after dragging and holding (by hexy)
- Fix keybinding for pipette showing while pasting blueprints
- Improve visibility of shape background in dark mode
- Added sound when destroying a building (Not entirely happy with that yet, tho)
- Added swedish translation
- Update tutorial image for tier 2 tunnels to explain how to mix and match them (by jimmyshadow1)
- Updated translations - Big thanks to all translators!


I also added a link to the Official Subreddit to the main menu since a lot of people were asking! :)

Hey guys!

I'm back from my vacation and already have an update prepared for you! I'll give you a quick summary and then tell you a bit about my future plans as always!




Many people have requested this - You can now pick-up the building below your mouse cursor with "Q" (configurable)! The pipette is available from the very beginning. Looking forward to your feedback!





The game soundtrack has been extended and now consists of 4 songs with over 13 minutes of playtime! It should be much less repetitive now - looking forward to your feedback!

It was composed by Peppsen - you should definitely check him out on Soundcloud!


Markes can now be 71 characters long! You can totally break your UI with this now, but I don't feel responsible! (Contribution by Joker-vD)




There is now a "Compact Building Infos" setting which will hide the description and image from the building info panel. This can be useful if you want it to be more compact.



(PS: You might notice I also fixed the hub marker being overlayed by the panel)


The dark theme is now also active in the menu! (Contribution by dengr1065).




I reworked the panel in the upper left which shows available keybindings - Now it is more consistent, and the shortcuts for cutting, pasting and deleting have been moved there as well.

It was also not showing the right shortcuts sometimes, which should be fixed now.


- Minor performance improvements by caching extractor items (by Phlosioneer)
- Automatically deselect area when selecting a new building
- Fix belt planner not placing the last belt
- Fix buildings getting deleted when right clicking while placing a blueprint
- Fix for exporting screenshots for huge bases (It was showing an empty file) (by xSparfuchs)
- Fix buttons not responding when using right click directly after left click (by davidburhans)
- Fix hub marker being hidden by building info panel
- Disable dialog background blur since it can cause performance issues
- Added simplified chinese translations
- Update translations (Thanks to all translators!)



There is a lot on my todo list, but the next thing will be the wires update! I actually made a survey in the discord which showed a more or less clear outcome:



So, the wire update will take some time (expect two weeks at least!), so I will keep you busy with minor updates while working on this huge update - just so you know what's going on!

I am also aware that the game can run pretty slow on later levels, especially if you don't delete old parts of your factory after they get unused. This is something on my todo list which I want to work on after the wires update! (Since it got prioritized 2nd highest by you!)

Besides of that, there are a lot of minor things (Like support for color-blind people, fixing bugs and more!) which I will be working on in parallel!

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 :)