Shapez 2's Early Access should run smoothly with factories 12x bigger than the first game

Shapez 2 will launch in Early Access on August 15th, bringing the relaxing, shape-cutting factory builder into 3D.

In a new post, its lead developer has laid out what to expect from Early Access. In the main: a polished, 40 hours-or-so experience with no known major issues, and a post-release roadmap waiting to be defined by player feedback.

"We’ve spent a lot of time polishing the game already and are really happy how it turned out. We believe it’s in a great state and is meant to be played," says the post. "With 4 game modes, there’s plenty of content to be explored. There should be at least 40 hours of content but it’s easy to get over a hundred hours or more, as our playtesters have proven already."

Tobspr Games - which has grown to eight people, rather than the mostly solo project of the original - has been working with patrons and the series' Discord community since development began. In that time they've run regular playtests, but also canvassed their players as to what features are most important to them, which proposed art style they prefer, and more. That relationship will continue into Early Access.

"I don’t like launching with a roadmap immediately, especially not for early access. If the roadmap is already predetermined, what impact do players actually have?"

There's also no pre-decided amount of time that Shapez 2 will spend in Early Access, because "it could be years in theory" and depends on how well it sells.

"Our dream goal would be to keep updating the game for many years while it finances the development. However, as the game industry is unpredictable, we don’t want to promise something we can’t keep."

One of the central ambitions of Shapez 2 was to improve performance over the original, according to the post.

"Performance was a frequent complaint [in Shapez 1], but there was nothing left to optimize. Shapez 1 is written in JavaScript, so it’s literally just a website. There is no support for efficient rendering, memory management or proper multithreading and the language itself is at least a magnitude slower than C++ or C#."

Shapez 1 would begin to lag for players "starting at around 5,000 - 10,000 buildings". By comparison, in Shapez 2 "everything should currently run very smooth until 100,000 buildings, pretty smooth until 250,000 buildings and depending on your setup somewhat smooth with 500,000 buildings (30 fps on a higher end setup)."

There's no hard limit on how many buildings players can create, and in testing some players have constructed factories with "1.25 million buildings and above", but experienced "significant lag."

I played Shapez 1 for the first time last week, for a fun few hours. It's a factory builder in which resources are unlimited, buildings are free, and there's no threat or time pressure. That makes it pretty perfect for pairing with some dumb-as-rocks episodes of Criminal Minds on a second screen. My few hours with it were enough to make me certain that I wanted to try Shapez 2 when it launches next week.