Hello everyone!
While we continue to work on Patch 1.3 we'd like to tell you a little bit about scourge of all game development: bugs! As well as the unsung heroes that combat them: Anthony, Bruno, and Joshua, our internal QA specialists. Let's talk weird shapez 2 bugs, how we handle your feedback, and how we choose which bugs to work and why some of them take longer than others!
Note: The gifs aren't visible to people in the UK. Steam blogs have a very tight upload size limit, and the only image hosting service supported by Steam is Imgur, which is blocked in the UK. To view the gifs, please check out the Reddit version of the devlog, or the video above.
Dealing with bugs
The QA team’s daily work includes compiling feedback and information from various sources This includes internal bug reports, the standalone feedback form linked in game, Steam Forums, and Discord, with the latter being our most active community feedback source. That's also due to the amazing community assistance we have from our moderators (seriously, you all are great!). Over all these sources, we try to keep the times to respond down to less than 24 hours on weekdays for bug reports.
Sometimes, these bugs can become seriously weird. We have dug deep into our archives to bring you a best of the weirdest bugs that we have encountered throughout the development of shapez 2. Like when Lorenzo found a new dimension while prototyping islands.
Or when we accidentally created a Disco version of the game multiple times.
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Unforgotten is also the insatiable Vortex of shape-death.
Then of course there are lots of instances of buildings overlapping or taking on a life of their own.
And finally, when we were working on the Unity upgrade, all of a sudden a bunch of icons were upside down. Not all, just some, including the Reddit logo. Why? Who knows. Bugs don't always have to make sense.
Prioritization
How though, do we decide what to fix next? Well, we take every bug report seriously and track them but there are many things to consider. One is release cadence: Do we want several smaller patches or bigger ones that take a bit more time? So far, we have opted to take our time with patches and make sure they don't break the game. Timing towards other events is also important, because as much as we test, we don't want to bring out a patch before a big sale where new players could potentially run into issues.
And then of course there is the issue of fix complexity versus impact. For every bug, we need to evaluate how many people are impacted by it versus how much effort it would take to fix and test it for our team and what other systems might be impacted. We have a couple of systems in place that help us get information of impacted. For example: While we are also adding player impact and affected player count ourselves, we have a system that counts up how often similar issues have been reported on Discord. We also build some automation informing us of the most active conversations on Discord.
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The more stable and further in development a game is the harder this gets, as “easy wins” become few and far between. And the more advanced and complex systems become, the more interconnected they are, the harder it becomes to do even little fixes in them. That why we are still very careful when approaching certain issues like the numerous bugs around predictions or trains. We have to make sure we don't break more than we would fix and to also not over-stretch our resources.
Now, currently we are working on the next patch for shapez 2 and we can't yet tell when it will drop. But one little thing we are already confident we are fixing is this: In the future, you will actually be able to press the 'O' key to select all connected rails. More contents of patch 1.3 coming in the future.
We hope you've enjoyed our little insight into what goes on behind the scenes when looking at resolving bugs, the importance of continued feedback on issues, and how much it helps us improve the game. Until next time!
