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Shapez.io: open-source base building game inspired by Factorio

373 points by smusamashah 6y ago

VectorLock 6y ago
This by the same guy who made diep.io? Looks like very similar style.
- dengr1065 6y ago
  This game is made by Tobias Springer, author of YORG.io and YORG.io 3 (and other contributors).
aurbano 6y ago
Bought the full version and played it for a good few hours - lovely game! After a while it did feel slightly too similar to work though (programming), as once you unlock copy pasting of structures it's really all about optimising. Still some good fun, and definitely worth the price :)
umvi 6y ago
I love when a game unlocks a new genre that further refines and perfects the formula... Dark Souls, Factorio, etc.
- TheTacoMerchant 6y ago
  Well, to be technical, it says in the Factorio about page that it's heavily inspired by a Minecraft mod called Buildcraft, so you could trace the genre back to there.
  - slim 6y ago
    minecraft was inspired by infiniminer https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecraft https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minec...
    - Kiro 6y ago
      Buildcraft is a Minecraft mod that is completely different from the vanilla game. Saying Factorio can be traced back to Infiniminer is a stretch.
  - ejj28 6y ago
    That's super cool, I never knew this but I always thought that it was very similar to Buildcraft.
MauranKilom 6y ago
Small feedback: I did not initially realize that the upgrades are different from the "main quest" and was wondering why all my upgrades required parts that I could not produce. Not sure if it could be clearer than having the thing I was missing smack-dab in the middle of the screen, but just sharing some experience.
- simias 6y ago
  There's some overlap between the upgrade and the "main quest" shapes (often main quest shapes enter upgrade recipes, as not to be immediately useless as the objective is reached). The current objective is always displayed on the left of the screen (and you can pin additional recipes there if you want).
avree 6y ago
This website broke my browser back button. :(
thurn 6y ago
What exactly are the limitations that prevent this game from working in Firefox to the point where they need a "please download Chrome" banner? Just curious, I thought WebAssembly and WebGL were pretty competitive these days.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  FWIW I can’t for the life of me get WebGL to work on Firefox anywhere near as good as it works on Chrome. GTS 1050 on Ubuntu.
- vbernat 6y ago
  I am also wondering. On my Firefox, it seems to run smoothly.
  - dengr1065 6y ago
    I completely agree - 99% of the time, I play (and test) the game on Firefox. It looks like it runs there even better than on Chromium. I've tried to tell the main developer that it 100% works, but the badge is still there; you can ignore it.
    - Kiro 6y ago
      What device are you on? I have an issue which only happens on Firefox on Mac where WebRender is disabled by default, causing massive drops in FPS. I think it works fine on Windows though.
      - dengr1065 6y ago
        A laptop with Intel Core i5-6200U (Linux, X11).
- dom96 6y ago
  This game appears to be written in JS. I've been working on a browser game recently myself and there is definitely some bottlenecks when it comes JS execution in Firefox, especially on Linux.
paulgb 6y ago
For a game that's open source and written in JavaScript, it's a shame that the packaged, downloadable version is only available through Steam on Windows. I'd pay the $5 for a DRM-free Mac version.
- opencl 6y ago
  It's also available for Linux. If the developer doesn't already own a Mac and have a paid Apple developer account they are probably not going to make back their money buying those things in order to make a Mac build.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    That's a very fair point! I didn't realize there was a Linux option. In that case, I'd also pay to be able to unlock all of the features on the web version.
  - SXX 6y ago
    Developer can certainly make build using Travis CI if someone decide to test it and contribute build configuration. It's open source after all.
    - mdaniel 6y ago
      The latest (as of this comment) change to package.json was a PR to turn on macOS builds: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/pull/687 https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/pull/687 but unknown if the reservation was more political than technical
  - HenryBemis 6y ago
    There are a few sites that show step by step how you can run Mac on a VMWare on a PC. Yes it disregards some T&Cs but the dev will avoid the $1000 apple-tax.
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  You can get a DRM-free version from itch.io [1]. There is also a statement regarding MacOS, which reads: > Mac users: I currently don't do builds for your OS since it got much harder with the recent policy changes from apple. Feel free to make a PR! [1]: https://tobspr.itch.io/shapezio https://tobspr.itch.io/shapezio
jasonjayr 6y ago
Mindustry is another great open source game with factory-building mechanics to get upgrades.
- brylie 6y ago
  https://mindustrygame.github.io/ https://mindustrygame.github.io/
- bryan0 6y ago
  One great thing about mindustry is you can play on mobile. Shapez says “mobile coming soon” and Factorio would be just about impossible to play mobile
- Matheus28 6y ago
  I didn't know that was open source. It is such a well made game, I recommend it for anyone who liked factorio. The campaign is a bit repetitive, though. Side note: It runs so smoothly, I'm surprised it was made in Java as I didn't really notice any gc stutters.
  - jholman 6y ago
    Why would you expect to perceive GC stutters? Much as I loathe Java-the-language, it continues to amuse me that the game that sold for $2.5B (and that's after extracting revenue from 60 million sales) was written entirely in Java. I continue to suspect that GC concerns are mostly (but not entirely!) FUD. Can GC pauses cause some impact, certainly, but how much? Console certification standards are very gruelling, so for a studio with a huge budget, no price is too high to avoid failing certification because two frames go bad in ten minutes. Otherwise, how big an issue is it really?
    - Matheus28 6y ago
      Minecraft's java version has (or had, back when I played it) noticeable stutter issues (not necessarily caused by the gc). The Bedrock version (written in C++) is much smoother in comparison. The Java version is only for pc/linux/mac. Bedrock is used for modern consoles and mobile. I believe they also had a separate C++ code base for older consoles.
raldi 6y ago
Not even a screenshot for visitors on mobile.
- jiriro 6y ago
  Exactly. The impression was .. What a complete crap?!
  - Kiro 6y ago
    It's a game, open source and free. This is not some SaaS trying to maximize conversions.
    - laumars 6y ago
      Doesn’t mean the mobile page couldn’t be improved upon.
      - Kiro 6y ago
        No, but it doesn't warrant a "What a complete crap?!".
        laumars 6y ago
        True true
  - jiriro 6y ago
    To clarify. The game looks terrific! The “what a complete crap” belongs only to the shapez.io (mobile) home page. I just can’t believe that it was designed this way.
    - Kiro 6y ago
      I presume no-one has gotten around to fix it yet. Maybe they didn't have any screenshot that was a good representation when they put up the mobile warning. It's not going to happen magically by itself so feel free to send a PR: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8abbc6bf41ca59c061869c2/src/js/states/mobile_warning.js https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8a... My point is that this is an open source effort. It's not like someone intentionally omitted a screenshot to annoy people. It needs a contributor who cares about changing the mobile prompt for it to be fixed. I have a similar useless prompt in one of my open source games and it's just a boring issue to fix and I rather focus on the game itself.
Arkdy 6y ago
I gave up on Factorio when I realized that if I was gonna think that way, I might as well just write some code and make something tangible. But if it's just shapes, and I don't have to memorize as many new concepts, maybe the load will be light enough to be relaxing like Mini Metro.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  I found it hilarious how much Factorio and Satisfactory tired me out in the same way that programming does. I love them, but the difficulty curve that they give the player just strikes too many similarities with my day job. I feel like i want to play a Satisfactory-lite. Something that gives me the fun of programming without the complexity. Help me build an abomination of complexity that i don't have to maintain. Refactoring shouldn't exist in this hypothetical game, maintenance should never be a concern - just forward movement and the joy of unburdened chaos.
  - theptip 6y ago
    Have you tried any of the Zachtronics games? Magnum Opus, Spacechem, etc? Still scratches the “programming puzzle” itch for me, still complex in the later stages, but more bite sized problems so no refactoring/maintenance to speak of (unless you want to try reimplementing to beat your previous score).
    - mdaniel 6y ago
      I believe it was spacechem that made me long for testable components in the game, since the stage was conceptually getting several submodules to work, and then orchestrating their outputs into the final product When I started longing for unit testing in a game, that was the end for me
  - Dauros 6y ago
    > Refactoring shouldn't exist in this hypothetical game Without refactoring the factory planning phase would be more difficult since I don't want to fill the best places on the map with unmaintainable, non scalable factories. Refactoring should be very easy, e.g. like in Factorio with construction bots: just press ctrl + x and the bad part of the factory is gone. If you want to build an abomination, try SeaBlock mod [1] for Factorio. You don't have to refactor anything, space and resources are infinite, so just build a new factory next to the old one after you research a new tier of technology. [1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock
sdfjkl 6y ago
That website is very wrong. The links aren't links and right-clicking is disabled.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  Links are anchor tags and right clicking works for me on Firefox.
zyxzevn 6y ago
To make the upgrades and building more interesting, it would be more of a challenge when upgraded structures require certain parts. Parts that you have to build yourself.
ezconnect 6y ago
Factorio seems like a nice UI to program FPGAs
- narrationbox 6y ago
  Maybe for CPLDs, the abstraction level of Factorio is a bit too low for FPGAs unless you want to work entirely at the transistor level.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thomasikzelf 6y ago
Great game. In about 4 days the wire update will be released, which includes logic gates into the game: https://shapez.io/wires/ https://shapez.io/wires/
dlhavema 6y ago
Add a link or something to not completely turn away mobile browsers. I can't play now, but would love to see what it's like with screenshots or something...
- laumars 6y ago
  Yeah. The mobile page is rather hostile. I went to the site with no intention to play on the phone but just to find out more about it. Instead I got turned away.
  - dailypeeker 6y ago
    This feedback seems to be incorporated already. Quick!
chrisdalke 6y ago
Really smooth gameplay, nice art style, satisfying sound effects -- Nice work!
simias 6y ago
I bought this game a couple of weeks ago and played it for a few hours. The build system is a lot more relaxed than Factorio, since you have no enemies and you have access to an unlimited amount of elementary building blocks (mines, transport belts, splitters etc...) whereas in Factorio you have to assemble everything from elementary ores. The advantage is that it makes Shapez a lot more chill to play and a lot more forgiving. The inconvenient is that it's also vastly easier and it doesn't have quite as much depth. Once you reach the level 15 or so it starts getting very repetitive, since you're always doing the same thing over and over, just at an always greater scale. Factorio is better at varying its gameplay, the game really plays differently as you unlock trains, blueprints, drones, etc... Of course Shapez is a much younger game, so it's unfair to expect the same level of polish and variety. At any rate there's no reason not to support a nice open source game at this price, so I definitely recommend giving it a try.
- overlordalex 6y ago
  Then I think you'd be excited to know that there is a major content update coming on the 8th of October that adds logic, wires, and some other new components to make the late game more interesting. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the first few hours and I feel like I got my monies worth even without the upcoming update
  - simias 6y ago
    Interesting, I'll be sure to try it out. And yeah I actually found the first couple of hours actually more fun than Factorio (at least once you know how Factorio works) because you get started much faster. But yeah, Shapez loses steam a lot faster too, while Factorio keeps ramping up. I think the main problem of Shapez is not so much that there aren't logic or wires though, it's that (with the exception of blueprints) you only build disposable components. In Factorio with the exception of science packs every production artifact can be useful on its own which means that you build to build to build to build... Whereas in shapez once you're done making your "blue stars in red squares with a purple circular corner" factory then you can forget about it completely.
lloydatkinson 6y ago
“I’m sorry but this game is not available on mobile devices” What a short sighted approach to making a website. Just because I am on a phone I don’t get to even read about the game on the site? Fuck me for using a mobile device I guess.
- Kiro 6y ago
  There is no website. What you see is a warning in the game. If someone is up to the task there's room to render more information for mobile users here: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8abbc6bf41ca59c061869c2/src/js/states/mobile_warning.js https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8a...
thih9 6y ago
Offtopic, I've opened the game on my macbook pro 15" 2018, the one with touchbar. I picked the web version and opened it in chromium. After about 10 minutes the laptop got unbearably hot and the fans were audible. This is a popular problem so I wanted to gather more data, are others experiencing thermal issues now as well?
shapeofmyheart 6y ago
Fun for a while, but quickly devolves into make work.
oh_boy 6y ago
Would be good if the website would feature a description and screenshots when accessing it on mobile.
Donckele 6y ago
Does anyone know why ffmpeg is a dependency?
tomc1985 6y ago
It broke the back button and insulted my browser....
mdaniel 6y ago
$ git clone https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io.git Receiving objects: 100% (16655/16655), 534.19 MiB | 2.09 MiB/s, done. wowzers, 535MB for an in-browser game? But it seems it's the res_raw, and the sounds subdir specifically, that's the source of pain: 168K res_raw/sounds/sfx/dialog_ok.wav 236K res_raw/sounds/sfx/place_building.wav 280K res_raw/sprites/belt/built 352K res_raw/sounds/sfx/destroy_building.wav 728K res_raw/sounds/sfx/badge_notification.wav 1.2M res_raw/sounds/sfx/level_complete.wav 17M res_raw/sounds/music/menu.wav 44M res_raw/sounds/music/theme-short.mp3 80M res_raw/sounds/music/theme-full.mp3 With a 535MB clone size, how many times have those files changed?! It seems LFS was jettisoned with the explanation "Get rid of lfs files" https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/f12cae7bd3fc3b51f895810039a84136f6db4c2a https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/f12cae7bd3fc3b51f... so there goes my suggestio for how to keep game binaries outside of the clone pain
- hughes 6y ago
  What do you suggest here? Git surgery to rebase through all 1700 commits looking for large files, or blowing away the repo and starting from scratch? Neither seems particularly appealing for the benefit of saving a few hundred megabytes of developers' disk space.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    If there are a finite amount of large files: https://myopswork.com/how-remove-files-completely-from-git-repository-history-47ed3e0c4c35 https://myopswork.com/how-remove-files-completely-from-git-r...
- snorrah 6y ago
  Have you considered using —depth to reduce the size of your clone?
ALittleLight 6y ago
Very fun game. One thing I liked about Factorio that I'm not sure if this has in the main version (or possibly just somewhere I haven't discovered yet - ~1 hour in), is the stats feature. I'd like to see how many blocks of each kind I'm producing. I loved driving those metrics up in factorio, and it felt immensely satisfying to raise production to orders of magnitude higher than I previously had them once I was done with some refactoring. Likewise, I feel it would help gameplay to understand the relative throughput of each of each of the pieces. For example, when painting it seems a few extractors are enough to provide all the paint I need compared to many extractors to get the shapes. What are the ratios here? Is painting faster than cutting? How long does rotating take, etc.
TenJack 6y ago
Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyorY1uIqiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyorY1uIqiQ
mNovak 6y ago
No belt merging, that's surprising
- PowerBar 6y ago
  It's an upgrade you earn in a later level.
trungdq88 6y ago
This is a great game. My only wish is for the dev to add something to keep players continue playing. After a few hours of playing, I unlocked all levels and then I don't see a point to continue to play anymore. I'll play it again once the wire update come out though.
TenJack 6y ago
Anyone have any idea how much the the video ads that play on the web version pay per view?
PeterStuer 6y ago
Not sure about the big warning I got upfront about performance in my browser (Firefox) urging me to switch to Chrome. I ignored it and everything ran just fine.
pabe 6y ago
Neat game. I like that it's not as heavy as Factorio. I love that it's open source software. Games are usually challenging programming tasks. I had fun looking up how tiles are moved on bands =) Maybe a mini-shapez game would be a nice addition for digitization consultancies, so business prospects can experience the pros of automation.
OhHiMarkos 6y ago
Great stuff. I just browsed your work. Can you share what technologies are you using?
recrudesce 6y ago
Bought this a while back and have so far played it for 23 hours. Sometimes I left it running in the background just for the music :P
hpeinar 6y ago
I'm assuming the standalone Steam version is also using Electron? I've never thought of it being possible to release games with Electron on Steam. I wonder if one could also wrap SVG based game into Electron and put it up to Steam
- Jowsey 6y ago
  Startup Company and Game Dev Tycoon are both packaged with Electron iirc
martin_a 6y ago
This game costs 3,50 Euro and it took me around 15 chilled hours to play the "main missions" (up to level 19 right now). I think I never had that much fun from a game that cheap. I also like how the game evolves over time. First you are mainly thinking about how to create specific shapes, while in the end it's all about optimization and how to get more output from your "machines". Love it, clear recommendation!

373 points by smusamashah 6y ago

VectorLock 6y ago

This by the same guy who made diep.io? Looks like very similar style.

dengr1065 6y ago
This game is made by Tobias Springer, author of YORG.io and YORG.io 3 (and other contributors).

aurbano 6y ago

Bought the full version and played it for a good few hours - lovely game! After a while it did feel slightly too similar to work though (programming), as once you unlock copy pasting of structures it's really all about optimising. Still some good fun, and definitely worth the price :)

umvi 6y ago

I love when a game unlocks a new genre that further refines and perfects the formula... Dark Souls, Factorio, etc.

TheTacoMerchant 6y ago
Well, to be technical, it says in the Factorio about page that it's heavily inspired by a Minecraft mod called Buildcraft, so you could trace the genre back to there.
- slim 6y ago
  minecraft was inspired by infiniminer https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecraft https://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minec...
  - Kiro 6y ago
    Buildcraft is a Minecraft mod that is completely different from the vanilla game. Saying Factorio can be traced back to Infiniminer is a stretch.
- ejj28 6y ago
  That's super cool, I never knew this but I always thought that it was very similar to Buildcraft.

MauranKilom 6y ago

Small feedback: I did not initially realize that the upgrades are different from the "main quest" and was wondering why all my upgrades required parts that I could not produce. Not sure if it could be clearer than having the thing I was missing smack-dab in the middle of the screen, but just sharing some experience.

simias 6y ago
There's some overlap between the upgrade and the "main quest" shapes (often main quest shapes enter upgrade recipes, as not to be immediately useless as the objective is reached). The current objective is always displayed on the left of the screen (and you can pin additional recipes there if you want).

avree 6y ago

This website broke my browser back button. :(

thurn 6y ago

What exactly are the limitations that prevent this game from working in Firefox to the point where they need a "please download Chrome" banner? Just curious, I thought WebAssembly and WebGL were pretty competitive these days.

Waterluvian 6y ago
FWIW I can’t for the life of me get WebGL to work on Firefox anywhere near as good as it works on Chrome. GTS 1050 on Ubuntu.
vbernat 6y ago
I am also wondering. On my Firefox, it seems to run smoothly.
- dengr1065 6y ago
  I completely agree - 99% of the time, I play (and test) the game on Firefox. It looks like it runs there even better than on Chromium. I've tried to tell the main developer that it 100% works, but the badge is still there; you can ignore it.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    What device are you on? I have an issue which only happens on Firefox on Mac where WebRender is disabled by default, causing massive drops in FPS. I think it works fine on Windows though.
    - dengr1065 6y ago
      A laptop with Intel Core i5-6200U (Linux, X11).
dom96 6y ago
This game appears to be written in JS. I've been working on a browser game recently myself and there is definitely some bottlenecks when it comes JS execution in Firefox, especially on Linux.

paulgb 6y ago

For a game that's open source and written in JavaScript, it's a shame that the packaged, downloadable version is only available through Steam on Windows. I'd pay the $5 for a DRM-free Mac version.

opencl 6y ago
It's also available for Linux. If the developer doesn't already own a Mac and have a paid Apple developer account they are probably not going to make back their money buying those things in order to make a Mac build.
- paulgb 6y ago
  That's a very fair point! I didn't realize there was a Linux option. In that case, I'd also pay to be able to unlock all of the features on the web version.
- SXX 6y ago
  Developer can certainly make build using Travis CI if someone decide to test it and contribute build configuration. It's open source after all.
  - mdaniel 6y ago
    The latest (as of this comment) change to package.json was a PR to turn on macOS builds: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/pull/687 https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/pull/687 but unknown if the reservation was more political than technical
- HenryBemis 6y ago
  There are a few sites that show step by step how you can run Mac on a VMWare on a PC. Yes it disregards some T&Cs but the dev will avoid the $1000 apple-tax.
MrGilbert 6y ago
You can get a DRM-free version from itch.io [1]. There is also a statement regarding MacOS, which reads: > Mac users: I currently don't do builds for your OS since it got much harder with the recent policy changes from apple. Feel free to make a PR! [1]: https://tobspr.itch.io/shapezio https://tobspr.itch.io/shapezio

jasonjayr 6y ago

Mindustry is another great open source game with factory-building mechanics to get upgrades.

brylie 6y ago
https://mindustrygame.github.io/ https://mindustrygame.github.io/
bryan0 6y ago
One great thing about mindustry is you can play on mobile. Shapez says “mobile coming soon” and Factorio would be just about impossible to play mobile
Matheus28 6y ago
I didn't know that was open source. It is such a well made game, I recommend it for anyone who liked factorio. The campaign is a bit repetitive, though. Side note: It runs so smoothly, I'm surprised it was made in Java as I didn't really notice any gc stutters.
- jholman 6y ago
  Why would you expect to perceive GC stutters? Much as I loathe Java-the-language, it continues to amuse me that the game that sold for $2.5B (and that's after extracting revenue from 60 million sales) was written entirely in Java. I continue to suspect that GC concerns are mostly (but not entirely!) FUD. Can GC pauses cause some impact, certainly, but how much? Console certification standards are very gruelling, so for a studio with a huge budget, no price is too high to avoid failing certification because two frames go bad in ten minutes. Otherwise, how big an issue is it really?
  - Matheus28 6y ago
    Minecraft's java version has (or had, back when I played it) noticeable stutter issues (not necessarily caused by the gc). The Bedrock version (written in C++) is much smoother in comparison. The Java version is only for pc/linux/mac. Bedrock is used for modern consoles and mobile. I believe they also had a separate C++ code base for older consoles.

raldi 6y ago

Not even a screenshot for visitors on mobile.

jiriro 6y ago
Exactly. The impression was .. What a complete crap?!
- Kiro 6y ago
  It's a game, open source and free. This is not some SaaS trying to maximize conversions.
  - laumars 6y ago
    Doesn’t mean the mobile page couldn’t be improved upon.
    - Kiro 6y ago
      No, but it doesn't warrant a "What a complete crap?!".
      - laumars 6y ago
        True true
- jiriro 6y ago
  To clarify. The game looks terrific! The “what a complete crap” belongs only to the shapez.io (mobile) home page. I just can’t believe that it was designed this way.
  - Kiro 6y ago
    I presume no-one has gotten around to fix it yet. Maybe they didn't have any screenshot that was a good representation when they put up the mobile warning. It's not going to happen magically by itself so feel free to send a PR: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8abbc6bf41ca59c061869c2/src/js/states/mobile_warning.js https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8a... My point is that this is an open source effort. It's not like someone intentionally omitted a screenshot to annoy people. It needs a contributor who cares about changing the mobile prompt for it to be fixed. I have a similar useless prompt in one of my open source games and it's just a boring issue to fix and I rather focus on the game itself.

Arkdy 6y ago

I gave up on Factorio when I realized that if I was gonna think that way, I might as well just write some code and make something tangible. But if it's just shapes, and I don't have to memorize as many new concepts, maybe the load will be light enough to be relaxing like Mini Metro.

adkadskhj 6y ago
I found it hilarious how much Factorio and Satisfactory tired me out in the same way that programming does. I love them, but the difficulty curve that they give the player just strikes too many similarities with my day job. I feel like i want to play a Satisfactory-lite. Something that gives me the fun of programming without the complexity. Help me build an abomination of complexity that i don't have to maintain. Refactoring shouldn't exist in this hypothetical game, maintenance should never be a concern - just forward movement and the joy of unburdened chaos.
- theptip 6y ago
  Have you tried any of the Zachtronics games? Magnum Opus, Spacechem, etc? Still scratches the “programming puzzle” itch for me, still complex in the later stages, but more bite sized problems so no refactoring/maintenance to speak of (unless you want to try reimplementing to beat your previous score).
  - mdaniel 6y ago
    I believe it was spacechem that made me long for testable components in the game, since the stage was conceptually getting several submodules to work, and then orchestrating their outputs into the final product When I started longing for unit testing in a game, that was the end for me
- Dauros 6y ago
  > Refactoring shouldn't exist in this hypothetical game Without refactoring the factory planning phase would be more difficult since I don't want to fill the best places on the map with unmaintainable, non scalable factories. Refactoring should be very easy, e.g. like in Factorio with construction bots: just press ctrl + x and the bad part of the factory is gone. If you want to build an abomination, try SeaBlock mod [1] for Factorio. You don't have to refactor anything, space and resources are infinite, so just build a new factory next to the old one after you research a new tier of technology. [1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SeaBlock

sdfjkl 6y ago

That website is very wrong. The links aren't links and right-clicking is disabled.

Kaze404 6y ago
Links are anchor tags and right clicking works for me on Firefox.

zyxzevn 6y ago

To make the upgrades and building more interesting, it would be more of a challenge when upgraded structures require certain parts. Parts that you have to build yourself.

ezconnect 6y ago

Factorio seems like a nice UI to program FPGAs

narrationbox 6y ago
Maybe for CPLDs, the abstraction level of Factorio is a bit too low for FPGAs unless you want to work entirely at the transistor level.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thomasikzelf 6y ago

Great game. In about 4 days the wire update will be released, which includes logic gates into the game: https://shapez.io/wires/ https://shapez.io/wires/

dlhavema 6y ago

Add a link or something to not completely turn away mobile browsers. I can't play now, but would love to see what it's like with screenshots or something...

laumars 6y ago
Yeah. The mobile page is rather hostile. I went to the site with no intention to play on the phone but just to find out more about it. Instead I got turned away.
- dailypeeker 6y ago
  This feedback seems to be incorporated already. Quick!

chrisdalke 6y ago

Really smooth gameplay, nice art style, satisfying sound effects -- Nice work!

simias 6y ago

I bought this game a couple of weeks ago and played it for a few hours. The build system is a lot more relaxed than Factorio, since you have no enemies and you have access to an unlimited amount of elementary building blocks (mines, transport belts, splitters etc...) whereas in Factorio you have to assemble everything from elementary ores. The advantage is that it makes Shapez a lot more chill to play and a lot more forgiving. The inconvenient is that it's also vastly easier and it doesn't have quite as much depth. Once you reach the level 15 or so it starts getting very repetitive, since you're always doing the same thing over and over, just at an always greater scale. Factorio is better at varying its gameplay, the game really plays differently as you unlock trains, blueprints, drones, etc... Of course Shapez is a much younger game, so it's unfair to expect the same level of polish and variety. At any rate there's no reason not to support a nice open source game at this price, so I definitely recommend giving it a try.

overlordalex 6y ago
Then I think you'd be excited to know that there is a major content update coming on the 8th of October that adds logic, wires, and some other new components to make the late game more interesting. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the first few hours and I feel like I got my monies worth even without the upcoming update
- simias 6y ago
  Interesting, I'll be sure to try it out. And yeah I actually found the first couple of hours actually more fun than Factorio (at least once you know how Factorio works) because you get started much faster. But yeah, Shapez loses steam a lot faster too, while Factorio keeps ramping up. I think the main problem of Shapez is not so much that there aren't logic or wires though, it's that (with the exception of blueprints) you only build disposable components. In Factorio with the exception of science packs every production artifact can be useful on its own which means that you build to build to build to build... Whereas in shapez once you're done making your "blue stars in red squares with a purple circular corner" factory then you can forget about it completely.

lloydatkinson 6y ago

“I’m sorry but this game is not available on mobile devices” What a short sighted approach to making a website. Just because I am on a phone I don’t get to even read about the game on the site? Fuck me for using a mobile device I guess.

Kiro 6y ago
There is no website. What you see is a warning in the game. If someone is up to the task there's room to render more information for mobile users here: https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8abbc6bf41ca59c061869c2/src/js/states/mobile_warning.js https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/blob/5a3807883e44640bb8a...

thih9 6y ago

Offtopic, I've opened the game on my macbook pro 15" 2018, the one with touchbar. I picked the web version and opened it in chromium. After about 10 minutes the laptop got unbearably hot and the fans were audible. This is a popular problem so I wanted to gather more data, are others experiencing thermal issues now as well?

shapeofmyheart 6y ago

Fun for a while, but quickly devolves into make work.

oh_boy 6y ago

Would be good if the website would feature a description and screenshots when accessing it on mobile.

Donckele 6y ago

Does anyone know why ffmpeg is a dependency?

tomc1985 6y ago

It broke the back button and insulted my browser....

mdaniel 6y ago

$ git clone https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io.git Receiving objects: 100% (16655/16655), 534.19 MiB | 2.09 MiB/s, done. wowzers, 535MB for an in-browser game? But it seems it's the res_raw, and the sounds subdir specifically, that's the source of pain: 168K res_raw/sounds/sfx/dialog_ok.wav 236K res_raw/sounds/sfx/place_building.wav 280K res_raw/sprites/belt/built 352K res_raw/sounds/sfx/destroy_building.wav 728K res_raw/sounds/sfx/badge_notification.wav 1.2M res_raw/sounds/sfx/level_complete.wav 17M res_raw/sounds/music/menu.wav 44M res_raw/sounds/music/theme-short.mp3 80M res_raw/sounds/music/theme-full.mp3 With a 535MB clone size, how many times have those files changed?! It seems LFS was jettisoned with the explanation "Get rid of lfs files" https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/f12cae7bd3fc3b51f895810039a84136f6db4c2a https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/f12cae7bd3fc3b51f... so there goes my suggestio for how to keep game binaries outside of the clone pain

hughes 6y ago
What do you suggest here? Git surgery to rebase through all 1700 commits looking for large files, or blowing away the repo and starting from scratch? Neither seems particularly appealing for the benefit of saving a few hundred megabytes of developers' disk space.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  If there are a finite amount of large files: https://myopswork.com/how-remove-files-completely-from-git-repository-history-47ed3e0c4c35 https://myopswork.com/how-remove-files-completely-from-git-r...
snorrah 6y ago
Have you considered using —depth to reduce the size of your clone?

ALittleLight 6y ago

Very fun game. One thing I liked about Factorio that I'm not sure if this has in the main version (or possibly just somewhere I haven't discovered yet - ~1 hour in), is the stats feature. I'd like to see how many blocks of each kind I'm producing. I loved driving those metrics up in factorio, and it felt immensely satisfying to raise production to orders of magnitude higher than I previously had them once I was done with some refactoring. Likewise, I feel it would help gameplay to understand the relative throughput of each of each of the pieces. For example, when painting it seems a few extractors are enough to provide all the paint I need compared to many extractors to get the shapes. What are the ratios here? Is painting faster than cutting? How long does rotating take, etc.

TenJack 6y ago

Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyorY1uIqiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyorY1uIqiQ

mNovak 6y ago

No belt merging, that's surprising

PowerBar 6y ago
It's an upgrade you earn in a later level.

trungdq88 6y ago

This is a great game. My only wish is for the dev to add something to keep players continue playing. After a few hours of playing, I unlocked all levels and then I don't see a point to continue to play anymore. I'll play it again once the wire update come out though.

TenJack 6y ago

Anyone have any idea how much the the video ads that play on the web version pay per view?

PeterStuer 6y ago

Not sure about the big warning I got upfront about performance in my browser (Firefox) urging me to switch to Chrome. I ignored it and everything ran just fine.

pabe 6y ago

Neat game. I like that it's not as heavy as Factorio. I love that it's open source software. Games are usually challenging programming tasks. I had fun looking up how tiles are moved on bands =) Maybe a mini-shapez game would be a nice addition for digitization consultancies, so business prospects can experience the pros of automation.

OhHiMarkos 6y ago

Great stuff. I just browsed your work. Can you share what technologies are you using?

recrudesce 6y ago

Bought this a while back and have so far played it for 23 hours. Sometimes I left it running in the background just for the music :P

hpeinar 6y ago

I'm assuming the standalone Steam version is also using Electron? I've never thought of it being possible to release games with Electron on Steam. I wonder if one could also wrap SVG based game into Electron and put it up to Steam

Jowsey 6y ago
Startup Company and Game Dev Tycoon are both packaged with Electron iirc

martin_a 6y ago

This game costs 3,50 Euro and it took me around 15 chilled hours to play the "main missions" (up to level 19 right now). I think I never had that much fun from a game that cheap. I also like how the game evolves over time. First you are mainly thinking about how to create specific shapes, while in the end it's all about optimization and how to get more output from your "machines". Love it, clear recommendation!