Hello everyone! When shapez 2 released to Early Access in August 2024, it shipped with the visuals we were satisfied with at the time. We’re always looking to improve and refine the player’s experience, and the visual design is a big part of that. So during the Early Access period, we’ve updated many of the visuals in shapez 2 with your feedback, but there’s a lot more on the way with the 1.0 update. Before we get into these new updates though, it’s important to know why we make certain changes.
The visuals are the first impression for a player. It immerses them into the world and, notably for an automation game like shapez 2, communicates the game’s mechanics. So for shapez 2, we designed everything around 5 principles.
Instead of shapes going into a mysterious machine and magically outputting something differently, all production buildings are designed to be open. This way you can clearly see what a machine does just by looking at it, instead of reading about it. Show a Stacker to someone who has never seen shapez before, and they’ll know what it does right away.
Each elements should be easily distinguishable from one another through size, silhouette, contrast and/or colour.
Designs need to work from a gameplay perspective, both when designing up close and from a space building level. It should be clear when something is working, but also show what’s wrong when it’s not working.
It may be a tad more boring, but designs need to be viable from a development perspective. As an example, we could take 6 months to rework trains. But would that be worth the time invested, or would that time be better used elsewhere? Or would these changes have negative impact on game performance? As a smaller development team, we have certain restraints that need to be considered when making design decisions.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, changes need to be in line with our vision of the game. As Max, our art director, beautifully put it: you wouldn’t place Disneyland’s fairy tale castle as the background for a Dark Souls boss fight, that just wouldn’t work. We need to make design feels like it belongs in shapez 2.
So, we’ve been updating the visuals in the past 18 months. We showcased some of this in our devlog from last November, where we highlighted the process of improving the visual fidelity of some of the older assets, such as Train Stations. Whilst on the subject of trains, all train visuals have undergone improvement from trains, to loaders, stations and packages.
We've also reworked the visuals to a handful of features, such as the fluid system. Originally the shape launcher and fluid launchers were very similar in design, but we wanted to make a better distinction between the two. They’ve been greatly improved, with the launcher, catcher and liquid ball better reflecting fluids.
Fluid space pipes better reflect their liquid nature with straight and curved sections piped, showing the fluids inside and their junctions covered. From further away you'll be able to clearly distinguish the fluid balls from the shapes which now show on space belts allowing you to easily see what's going where in your factories. We've adjusted the colours of the space pipes as well, with help from our Discord!
Numbers have been added to represent the floor levels the resources are travelling along and we've improved the input and output visuals of the space belts.
The shape previews that predict what shape a system will be producing, allowing you to quickly spot errors ahead of production, have been refactored and also work for trains now.
The wiring system is likely the most complicated system of shapez 2. Introducing logic to your factory in the late game, to possibly make a Make Anything Machine, is something we really want to make easier to understand. It has always been in a work-in-progress state during Early Access, as it’s such a big undertaking, and now we’ve overhauled it completely for 1.0.
The wires themselves had a simple, glowing design to make them visually distinct from your belts and pipes, but these we considered placeholder. We want them to look more like actual wires, improve their glow and add contrast with bracing pieces and a dark grey cap underneath to help separate it from the floor. Once we had a concept, we had to consider all the variants like corner pieces and the different building levels. Only then could it be passed on to the 3D artists and finalized.
This same process extends to the rest of the wiring system, namely logic gates and simulated buildings.
We've also reworked the crystals, as the original placeholder looked noisy from further away, so we've made changes to make it easier to read.
When you’re working on visuals, the user interface is equally as important as the game itself. A bad UI can turn a fun game into an annoying experience, so we want to make sure the UI feels just as smooth as the gameplay.
We reworked the hotbar with additional colours to help differentiate between fluid, shape and wire buildings. The icons got a revamp to better reflect their use as well.
The knowledge panel has been restructured into multiple categories and is now searchable, and got an expansion as well.
We’ve improved the readability of the shop and research interfaces to clearly show which milestones are unlocked. You’ll now also get notifications when new research is unlocked.
To give you a glimpse behind the curtain, the new buildings for the Manufacture Mode went through several iterations. The new shape was formed around the idea of them being a cut gem, which was explored with multiple concepts prior to us arriving at this design. These new shapes are produced in the new trade stations, which themselves, along with the hub and research stations also needed designing. The initial concept started off quite different to the end design, with curved exteriors similar to individual space stations. This felt a little funky however, not quite fitting with the overall feel of the game.
With that in mind, they were redesigned and built with modules, which could then be reused for other trade stations. These were then crafted into different shaped stations before given a pass with colour to make them easily recognised as separate entities, and the transfer rocket crafted so that it blends into the overall design.
We hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at how we tackle the visual design of shapez 2! The style has evolved quite a bit since the Early Access launch as we’re making new additions to the game. Your feedback has been invaluable in this process, so we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts about it all.
As a final note, shapez 2 is now bundled with Alchemy Factory! You can get both games, or just the game you're missing, with an extra discount to sweeten the deal.