The thing about factory games is the final product doesn’t really matter. What’s being built, what’s its purpose? Who cares! The goal of making a thing isn’t so important as the process of its construction, with a million bits and pieces all whirring along in sync, each machine hand-placed in a system that makes perfect sense to the builder but is utterly incomprehensible to anyone else. There’s an order to the systems that’s satisfying to watch, and whatever the outcome may be is less important than that it all functions as designed. The original Shapez is a game about using factory elements to mine, cut, manipulate and stack basic shapes into a specific configuration, and the sequel is more of the same but much shinier and with a few wrinkles to the landscape to shake up production.
The basic premise of Shapez 2 is that there’s a huge warp-hole in the middle of a functionally-endless space-themed arena, and the object is to toss a huge number of the needed shape inside. The asteroids around the central area have shape deposits on them, providing an endless supply of basic units that can be cut up into four quadrants and reconfigured endlessly until you’ve got the requested piece. Once delivered the shapes count as currency, and the goal is to not only create the right thing, but do it fast enough so that you’re not waiting forever to purchase new tech that can make the factory bigger and more efficient. Cutters, rotators, painters, stackers and more unlock one tech-tier at a time, while bonus goals increase machine efficiency. While there’s a price for researching new tech, equipment is free once you’ve unlocked it, so there’s no reason to ever do anything but build big.
Shapez 2 promises to be a huge upgrade to the original game, complete with multi-layer factories so different processes can run in parallel without taking up more real estate, fluids for paint and other factory needs, trains for long-distance transportation when a rack of conveyor belts just isn’t practical, and much more. Lead developer Tobias Springer was kind enough to answer a few questions about Shapez 2 and creating such an intricate game, and the reveal trailer showing a massive factory in motion comes after. The Early Access launch of Shapez 2 isn’t until some unspecified point in 2024, but it’s never too early to learn about what goes in to making all the pieces work together.
[Hardcore Gamer] Shapez is different from other factory games by being more abstract, with the player not creating recognizable products or using real-world resources. What are the challenges and advantages of going so completely off the rails in comparison to the genre standards?
[Tobias Springer] Coming up with a visual style was pretty challenging for us, because the game is so abstract. Shapez 1 simply had a white background, whereas for Shapez 2 we wanted to introduce an actual theme. In the end, we settled for a space theme because that was the highest voted one from the community. However, we also have a lot of advantages due to that abstraction. Instead of having fixed recipes, there are almost infinite possible shape combinations. You don’t have to learn any recipes, instead shapes are produced from geometric operations (like cut, stack, paint, etc.). This allows for much more interesting production chains and also introduces a puzzle aspect that is very unique to shapez.
Factory games have a million moving parts, almost literally with the visible resources on conveyors being fed into machines with functioning parts. It’s always kind of amazing to see the large factories churning out their results, especially when taking into account how much is on screen at once. What kind of technical challenges are there in getting that all to show up on screen while keeping the production numbers straight internally?
Factory games are super hard to develop, since you have to optimize a lot internally and most engines are not ready to handle this. It’s both the simulation and rendering part that needs to be on point, and since we wanted to enable huge factories for Shapez 2, we spent a lot of time tackling these problems. Right now the simulation runs at a low UPS (0.5 ticks per second) while not in view, which enables building huge factories containing over a million buildings. However, we are still working on further optimizing it, and there are a few precision issues left.
Visually the first Shapez was fairly plain, and while Shapez 2 is notably more ornate with its 3D presentation and fancy lighting there’s not a bit of nature anywhere in the game, which on paper sounds like it should end up being visually sterile. What was the art design process to avoid this?
We actually discussed this within our team to come up with a solution. Since Shapez is so abstract, we didn’t want to include any elements like nature, fantasy, story and so on, since this is what makes the franchise somewhat unique. To avoid the game looking sterile, we tried to make everything look very “warm” and “friendly”, as well as adding a lot of details to enhance the buildings, space stations and background so they look more interesting.
I’ve yet to see a single factory game that hasn’t spent a good amount of time in Early Access. How important is player feedback to tuning the game?
Since factory games usually depend a lot on game mechanics and have (almost) no story, they require a lot of balancing and fine-tuning of these, especially if you don’t stick to proven formulas only. A lot of playtesting of new mechanics is required to ensure they are actually fun and enjoyable for a long time. This wouldn’t be possible without a lot of player feedback, which is why we have involved the community since day 1 of creating the prototype.
The factory genre is incredibly healthy, with an audience that seems constantly hungry for more, and it seems only a matter of time before a AAA studio dips its toes into the automation waters. What do you think a major studio taking the genre seriously could bring to the table that the smaller studios might struggle with?
This is a tough question. Triple A could definitely bring in much better graphics, although Satisfactory already looks pretty neat. If the graphics get too fancy, you are sacrificing too much performance for the simulation. I would probably expect a story (similar to Techtonica) because that adds a lot of content to the game. However, I think factory games are actually the perfect indie game genre. They don’t require a story, they don’t even require graphics to some extent (although having nice graphics is a plus) so while they are very heavy on the development side, you don’t need a huge team to produce them. All the Triple A advantages (awesome graphics, sound, story, …) are just bonuses that probably wouldn’t improve the gameplay a lot (if at all) but ramp up the production cost.
