The name and full game design for Never Sort By Color struck me like lightning all at once. Having sorted my own collection by color first, I knew I could make this fun and helpful.

This game has been an absolute joy to work on. Every moment, every challenge, every tweak and fix has been filled with beauty and exhilaration. Even after all these months, playtesting is still fun and entrancing.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to so many people.

First, to the fine folks at Unity. The GPU Resident Drawer is a miraculous piece of technology that made this game possible. Unity is entirely the reason this game looks so great.

Second, to the thousands of AFOLs who have contributed to the LDraw Part Library for nearly 30 years, as well as the Rebrickable, BrickLink and BrickOwl databases. There are over 16,000 unique pieces, more than a gigabyte of mesh data, far more than the textures.

Special thanks to the super talented master builders whose MOCs are included in the game: Brick Artisan, MocLife, Max Mikuláš Macháč of Mmmanybricks, Michael Horvath, and Chuck, Fukusaku, Levelcap, Łukasz Ćwik and Norton74 of BrickVault.

Thank you to all the players who wishlisted or played the demo. The thousands of emails I've gotten from the in-game feedback form have been super helpful in polishing away the remaining sloppy bits of work. If you love this game, please leave a review. If you don't, please email me through the in-game form.

I'll keep working hard for everyone who has given their time and money to this game. It's a big responsibility to be in charge of such a thing.

Looking ahead, there have been many requests for a direct build mode and for a brick village DLC. Let me know if you'd still like those after completing the game.

Sort by part. Always by part.
Never. Sort. By. Color.

- Bryan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4876650/Never_Sort_By_Color/


The game runs much faster on Steam Deck, controllers behave in every menu, Name Plates label your tables, and imported MOCs get their own settings.

• The brick shader is much lighter. In my worst-case view on a Steam Deck, a screen full of bricks went from about 25 fps to about 45.
  
• Subsurface scattering on bricks is gone. I rendered it on and off side by side and could not see a difference.
  
• Real-time shadows are off and the petal and gravel decals on the garden ground are removed. Both cost more than they showed.
  
• Brick scratches and smudges cost a fraction of what they did. They look slightly different up close.
  
• New options: Screen Space Reflections, Brick Scratches, and Brick Draw Limit, which hides bricks past a distance from 1 to 6 meters. Bricks outlined by Sorter's Eye stay visible past the limit.

• Setting a table or cabinet down on a pile could freeze the game for several seconds. It's close to instant now.
  
• On Low physics, the bricks a table pushes out of the way are set down already settled instead of raining back in. If you put the table on the spot where they normally come back, they go to a second spot.
  
• Picking up something with bricks resting on it no longer wakes them all in the same frame. On Low they are set straight down onto whatever is below, and on Medium and High they wake a few hundred per second.
  
• Steam Deck starts on Low physics. If you already picked a setting, yours is kept, and you can change it in Options under Physics Quality.

• Thai text was mostly missing on the Linux build. It all renders now.
  
• The game could crash on Linux and Steam Deck when it unlocked an achievement, often right after loading a save.
  
• Opening the Steam overlay now stops the game from reading your controller, so the menu underneath no longer moves.
  
• Quitting the game is faster.
  
• The Import MOC button is hidden on Steam Deck and Steam Machine, where there's no good way to browse for a file.

• Button prompts no longer flip to keyboard and mouse when a trackpad, gyro or stray mouse movement comes in. Only a mouse click or a key press switches them.
  
• Starting a new game with a controller shows controller prompts from the first frame.
  
• Trackpad and gyro aiming work while the game is in controller mode.
  
• The label menu works fully on a controller. It no longer opens stuck in the search box, and holding up can't lose the selection.
  
• Menus wrap. Up on the top item goes to the bottom, and down on the bottom goes to the top.
  
• The Brick Separator description shows the button to press instead of saying "click".

• In the Upgrades book, the description, price, level and money text are larger, and the button icons inside descriptions are larger still.
  
• The label menu drops the line above the search box that repeated the bin's name, and part counts are larger.
  
• Completed parts in an instruction book switch to a heavier font as well as turning green.
  
• Instruction book pages are slightly darker and the text is pure black, so bloom no longer washes it out.

• New in the shop for ¥100: the Name Plate, a small sign for a table or shelf. Aim at it and press Label to write what belongs there.
  
• Planned games start with a Name Plate in front of each stack of cabinets: Bricks, Plates, Tiles, Arches and so on, in your language.
  
• In Planned games, drawers now run in the same order as the label menu, parts get a drawer closer to the size they need, and the biggest piles get a second Wide Bin.

• Importing a MOC opens Model Settings, where you choose whether it's Display only, Explore, a Car, a Plane or a Helicopter, which way its nose points, where its rotor is, and its waterline. The game fills in a first guess. Aim at the book or the finished model and press Label to change it later.
  
• Planes and helicopters set down in mid-air were turned twice as far as you rotated them. The Space Shuttle landed 90 degrees off.
  
• Planes and helicopters keep their pose when you set them down in the air or step out of flying, so you can park one in a climb or a bank.
  
• Aiming at a model with a hinge showed a raw line of code where the rotate button should be. A player reported it.
  
• The name of a held instruction book is translated.

• If a save fails to load, the game no longer autosaves the broken world over it.
  
• A save interrupted halfway through writing is recovered on the next launch.
  
• Quitting right after returning to the main menu waits for the save to finish.

• The Never Sort By Color achievement unlocked after only four bins. It now waits until every 2x4 is sorted by color. Bricks inside models don't count against you.
  
• The Email Bryan achievement almost never unlocked when you sent feedback.
  
• Bucket Sort was still in English in most languages.
  
• The Chill, Techno and Japanese Lofi radio stations have translated names.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4876650/Never_Sort_By_Color/