Shapez 2 is coming to Early Access on August 15, bringing the relaxing shape-cutting game to 3D.
In a recent post, its lead developer wrote: shows what to expect from Early Access. In low: a polished, ~40-hour experience with no known major issues, and a post-launch roadmap waiting to be defined based on player feedback.
“We’ve already spent a lot of time polishing the game and are really happy with the results. We believe it’s in great shape and ready to play,” the post reads. “With 4 game modes, there’s a ton of content to explore. There should be at least 40 hours of content, but it’s easy to exceed 100 hours or more, as our testers have already proven.”
Tobspr Games — which has expanded to eight people instead of being the primarily solo project of the original — has been working with the series’ patrons and Discord community since development began. During that time, they’ve been running regular playtests, but also asking their players what features are most significant to them, what proposed art style they prefer, and more. That collaboration will continue into Early Access.
“I don’t like to launch a game with a roadmap right away, especially not in Early Access. If the roadmap is already set, what influence do players have?”
There’s also no word on how long Shapez 2 will be in Early Access, as “theoretically it could last for years” and it depends on how well it sells.
“Our ultimate goal is to keep updating the game for years to come, while it funds development. However, since the gaming industry is unpredictable, we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep.”
According to the post, one of the main goals of Shapez 2 was to improve performance over the original.
Shapez 1 would start to lag for players “starting at around 5,000 – 10,000 buildings.” By comparison, in Shapez 2 “everything should currently run very smoothly up to 100,000 buildings, quite smoothly up to 250,000 buildings, and depending on configuration, quite smoothly at 500,000 buildings (30 fps on higher-end configurations).”
There is no challenging limit on the number of buildings players can create, and during testing, some players built factories with “1.25 million buildings and more” but experienced “significant lag.”
Last week I played Shapez 1 for the first time, for a few enjoyable hours. It’s a factory builder where resources are unlimited, buildings are free, and there’s no threat or time pressure. That makes it a perfect game to pair with stupid-as-nails episodes of Criminal Minds on a second screen. A few hours spent with it was enough to make me want to try Shapez 2 when it releases next week.
