What Did We Play Yesterday?

I'm just popping in to give credit where it's due, I have been playing the heck out of this game. Sometimes I'll be in the mood to just... make things, and I'll start a new game and piddle around. I don't mind starting over, because I get better at the efficiency puzzle the more I play.

Sometimes you just gotta cut up and paint some shapes, know what I mean? I like having something to get super-focused on.

I haven't really messed around with mods that add levels and revamp the game, but I suppose it's only a matter of time.

Shapez by tobspr is a automation puzzle game that was designed to be a minimalist Factorio-lite. A demo version is available in the browser, the full version is at GOG and Steam.

After plowing through a handful of factory automation games looking for something to scratch a particular itch (mainly, I wanted to build stuff and work on optimizing my assembly lines without getting too bogged down by having to hunt down resources or spend a lot of time tearing down/rebuilding when a factory gets too sprawling and I start breaking out in hives), it turned out this was exactly what I was looking for. Shapez is a sandbox where I can build goofy machines then wipe it all away and start over while continuously upgrading and improving the parts and mechanisms used to build. Each level you're given a shape to assemble, and doing so usually unlocks a new building to use. You start out generating basic shapes, but soon you're slicing shapes and splicing them back together, mixing and adding colors, and so on. You can upgrade the speed of your buildings/machines by completing upgrade challenges, most of which (so far) require building X number of shapes.

There's a really healthy mod community, and I was able to add some QOL mods as well as a few things that just made the game more fun in general. For example, one thing that really bugs me is not all the parts are mirrored, and there's a mod for that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a certain type of person gets really obsessive about this game, and with all the mods that are out there you could really get lost in it for a while.

I got to level 14, which is the first level that has a production speed requirement (I think it was 8 custom shapes in 1 second), hit a bottleneck, and realized I'd completely neglected to upgrade my machines so they were, quite literally, too slow to generate parts fast enough. So I started over, the next time focusing more on achieving upgrades and not completely obliterating my machines each level.

Things DO start to get pretty messy after a while, but the game has a insanely huge landscape to build on, so I've gotten into the habit of setting up factories in different areas to produce certain types of shapes. The Portable Micro Hubs mod helped me get away from clustering everything around the games base single hub, which was legit causing me stress because when my factories get too messy I start to get antsy. I got my next game up to level 16 and decided to take a break, so I didn't even get around to unlocking things like wires.

After purchasing this on GOG I learned the DLC and full in-browser is only available on Steam. But I can confirm the full current version of the game is available on GOG despite it being listed as Version 1.0 for some reason.

tobspr is currently developing Shapes 2, which is basically this game leveled up 1000 times with 3D graphics and put in space. It looks cool, but also a bit overwhelming since it's multi-level.

Mods: - Auto Tunnels - Mirrored Buildings - Portable Micro Hub Receiver

Mindustry by AnukenDev is a tower defense automation game that I bought not realizing it has a tower defense component oops.

The campaign walks the player through the various machine and belt types, presenting a new mission scenario as various pieces are unlocked. I like the minimalist graphics and putting together belts is satisfying. I don't like the defense part, but I've started to accept each time I start a new mission I need to set up turrets and tanks so enemy waves don't come along and blow crap up while I'm in the middle of building.

The game has two campaign modes, Erekir and Serpulo (classic mode), plus a host of sandbox mode maps, and there are also a ton of mods out there. The campaigns walk you through the game mechanics, allowing you to research and unlock various factor parts and defenses as you complete objectives, and the sandbox mode just tosses you out there and says have fun bb.

I kinda settled into Serpulo because I like not having to worry about setting up a power grid, and it focuses a bit more on resource collection which is what makes these games fun for me. The campaign modes feature isolated sectors that are gradually unlocked. I like this, becuase I'm the sort of person that if I get halfway through a campaign and don't like how my base is laid out, I'll just auto-destruct it and start over.

I can see myself playing this off and on for a while, because I like how it scratches the automation part of my brain, but ultimately I found the tower defense aspect a little frustrating. Having a thing come along and wreck part of my factory every 5 minutes or whatever is not the vibe I'm looking for.

Rusty's Retirement by Mister Morris Games is an idle-farming multitask simulator that lives in the corner of your screen while you do other stuff.

Despite claiming to be over clickers, I snapped this up on release because I was intrigued by the docking mechanism and of course it has my type of farming and my type of cute pixel graphics. You can dock it at the bottom or side, and since docking at the bottom drove meslightly insane on my widescreen monitor I chose the right side.

I do enjoy treating this like a live wallpaper sometimes and letting it do its thing. The pixel art is top-notch, and I've had fun playing around with the new mechanics that are unlocked when buildings are purchased. That being said, it's such a non-game I often forget it exists. When I started writing this post I realized... oh, yeah, I haven't opened that thing since the day I bought it. Ironically, I think if there was a way to set it to full screen I'd get more invested, even though the selling point is that you can dock it and multitask. I think I'd also get a lot more invested if I was multitasking this while doing work more akin to a dayjob drudgery, since it's on my personal computer that I use during my free time I'm generally way more engaged in whatever my primary task is.