shapez 2 - Mod Contest Winners & Development Update

Hello everyone!

Today, we're ready to share the winners of the shapez 2 modding contest! We got a surprising amount of submissions and we were really impressed by the quality! Aside from the modding contest, we also have some fun things to share about Update 1.2, as well as the Puzzle project!

First things first, the winners of the modding contest! We received many unique and exciting mods from you, ranging from small quality of life tweaks to complete game overhauls. Thank you all for participating!

To pick the winners of the contest, we considered the following criteria:

• Originality: how new and refreshing the idea itself is.

• Technical Achievement: the technical execution of the mod, i.e. how well its integrated and to what degree AI was used.

• Presentation: how it looks, whether through detailed buildings or clean UI elements.

• Gameplay: how it changes the gameplay of the game, either directly (new game mode, buildings) or indirectly (more accessible information, improved tools).

• Popularity: how it was picked up by the community already.

You all sure made it difficult to pick the winners, but here we go!

Because we got so many submissions, we added two runner ups to the winners. They'll both get some shapez merch in the mail!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3754100449

This mod adds two new buildings and 5 new crystal variants. The first building is the Dissolver, a building that dissolves a shape, extracts the most dominant part, and turns normal colored fluid into Unstable Fluid holding the data of the dominant part. You can then pump this Unstable Fluid to a Crystallizer, the second new building. If the dominant part in the Unstable Fluid matches the dominant part of the shape you send into the Crystallizer, that part is crystalized!

Essentially, it's a new way to add Crystal parts to a shape that also requires a whole new design. Plus, there are some new Crystal variants to discover.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3756339198

If you're looking to add some color to your factories, look no further! Space Platform Display allows you to, as the name implies, turn Space Platforms into massive displays. These can display any fluid color or shape code you input, and are visible while zoomed out, even in Overview Mode.

This can be used to mark points of interest like inputs and outputs of your setup, or color code your blueprints. Of course, if you give someone colors, art will be made! These platforms are great for drawing pixel art while Vortex LTD isn't looking.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3746029355

Mod Managers are a cornerstone of any modding community, and we think this is a great contender! This Mod Manager implements some of the core features we were already considering adding to the modding experience. It allows you to enable or disable mods without restarting the game, easily back up your saves, check mod compatibility and even upgrade old incompatible saves to be compatible! If you have some old saves lying around that you cannot use because of mod incompatibility, be sure to check this one out.

Congratulations, you win a 2TB SSD!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3742624162

Shape Recipe Lab is already one of the most popular mods on the Workshop, and we see why! Simply paste a shape code into the lab and the mod will figure out the ideal setup for you, presented in a production tree. If you get overwhelmed by some of the late-game shapes but do really want to keep expanding your factory, this is a great tool for you. However, figuring out how to make a shape is a big part of the game for some, so this mod may not be for everyone.

Congratulations, you win a 32GB of RAM!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3758107959

Wow. Just wow. In first places comes a new game mode that turns the shapez formula on its head, and does so in style: Arctic Ruins.

In the new game mode, the production process is quite literally inversed. Instead of mining shapes from asteroids, assembling them and delivering them to the Vortex, you receive shapes from the Vortex, de-assemble them and insert them into the asteroids. Filling an asteroid up will remove the newly-introduced fog of war (a snow storm in this case), unlocking new parts of the map.

The feature list is quite long, but this mod introduces new mechanics, new buildings, new milestones, new visuals, and randomly generated buildings to find around the map. Oh, and not to forget, there's new lore and even an intro cinematic. What?!

A very deserved congratulations to the talented Papierkorb2292, we're very impressed. You win the RTX 5080!

We'll be in touch with all the winners and runner ups for your address, so keep an eye on your inbox!

A big part of Update 1.2 will be an update to Unity that Noah, our Unity Developer, has been working on. Currently, shapez 2 uses Unity version 2022.3, which has served the development of the game since before Early Access. However, this version was officially deprecated in June. As such, 1.2 will see shapez 2 updated to the latest Unity Long Term Support version, 6000.3. While this version is 2.5 years newer than 2022.3, it does not mean we just jumped 3978 versions. They're just naming them different now.

So, what does this actually mean? Well, on the development side we'll get a whole bunch of new features, bug fixes and quality of life improvements across both the engine and editor. This will hopefully aid us in future updates, but our main concern for 1.2 is to get the game working on the feature and stability parity level that we currently have. Oddly enough, when it comes to the Unity update, this means we really hope you don't notice any big changes in 1.2. The actual changes will provide the foundation we build future updates on!

However, updating the engine of the game is easier said than done, and we have some "fun" experiences to share. To preface this, we'd like to walk you through the process of updating the engine:

1. The project is first opened in the new Unity version. Unity itself handles re-import any assets that need to be processed differently between versions.

2. You'll then be informed of any issue that arose during this process before even launching the game. For example, one of the game assets was broken during the importing process. The game was then compiled without errors.

3. This means the game was able to be played and tested in the Unity editor, to check for any obvious unintended changes caused by the update. Once such a regression is found, you have to investigate the issue and research what changes led to the issue.

4. Once all regression were resolved on that specific PC, the resulting version is then handed over to the QA team, who within minutes uncovered numerous other issues that weren't showing before. These then needed to be reproduced in order to be fixed.

While this all only took four steps on paper, the whole process of fixing every issue that reared its (presumably) ugly head took around 2 weeks to reach a state where the game is both fully functional and stable. Some of these bugs were interesting to say the least, so let's looks at a couple.

In this first screenshot that we took right after updating to Unity 6000.3, we got a whole bunch of issues teaming up to create something truly cursed, but also quite cool!

• Asteroids are missing as they were causing a GPU driver crash due to uninitialized memory.

• Colors appeared washed out due to color grading being done in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) instead of High Dynamic Range (HDR).

• All transparency effects were incorrectly blended on top of opaque elements.

• Our custom fog and outline post processing was being applied incorrectly.

With all that fixed, it looks like shapez 2 again!

Another highlight, pun intended, is this shader situation. The yellow and magenta you see are backup shaders used to highlight any missing shaders. As you can see, there were a lot of missing shaders.

And here's yellow shapez 2, just to ruin your day.

Here, train lines in the new version spawned an infinite amount of trains spawned. This would happen when you return to the game after minimising the game, specifically on DX12 in fullscreen mode. Zooming out would cause another shader bug to occur, causing invalid colors and the bloom effect you see on the trains.

So yeah, these are just a few of the adventures we went on for two weeks. However, we're pleased to say that with this update we've managed to make some progress on some longer standing issues. For example, Vulkan crashing when using AMD graphic cards and DX12 randomly crashing when zooming the camera in and out.

Finally, some progress on the Puzzles project! In case you missed it, we're working on puzzles for shapez 2. These puzzles will be similar to the Puzzle DLC of shapez 1, but with the new mechanics of shapez 2. The platforms and extra dimension will be a fun extra challenge!

While we're not ready to share the details on the game, we do want to share a first look of what our artist Nigel has been cooking up. Of course, everything here is early work in progress, so very much subject to change.

The general idea is that puzzles will have background environments that go beyond the Space setting of shapez 2. We'll have a bunch of different backgrounds, ranging from dreamlike shape-scapes where the shapes take on a life of their own...

to something like the lab we just started working on.

As puzzles are quite individual, the team has a lot of freedom to play around and have some fun with the visuals. Though we won't be able to make a unique background for every single puzzle. Do share your background suggestions with us in the Discord!

We hope you enjoyed that deep dive. Be sure to check out the winning mods, and we'll see you again soon!