What is Mini Motorways again?
Mini Motorways, like its spiritual-if-not-exact prequel Mini Metro, is a minimalist strategy sim about diverting and managing traffic to meet the demands of a growing city. Players will be working against time, congestion, geography, and the city's own growth while they attempt to manage the road network and keep the city moving.
After the public transport-minded Mini Metro, why make a game about cars?
While anyone who interacts with any of us couldn’t possibly deny that we are, shall we say, train enthusiasts, we thought there was interesting ground to explore in the concept of a highway game. (Or, as we call them in New Zealand and some other parts of the world - motorways!)
Highways, at least in most cities that aren’t very new, tend to have interesting spatial challenges both from a geographic and an urban standpoint. Most motorway systems were developed long after the cities that host them were already built, so road planners are working not only against the geographical constraints that we represented in Mini Metro (hills, coastlines) but also against the city’s own pre-existing blueprint.
While the minimalist art style of Mini Motorways doesn’t go so far as to label things “heritage district” or “historical landmark” or “giant skyscraper that is Extremely In The Way,” the challenges of building placement in this game are meant to emulate those real life issues that city planners have to work around.
This sounds kind of neat! I wanna learn more!
Our programmer and designer Tana Tanoi gave a fantastic talk at GCAP Melbourne last year where he goes into the theory and practice of attempting to create a “spiritual successor” to Mini Metro that wasn’t just the same ol’ same ol’ but with cars. You can watch it here.
We also go into the game's design philosophy in this episode of the Controller Disconnected podcast for #LoveIndies week. While the pandemic has interrupted #LoveIndies for 2021, we still put some material together and will be sharing it both here and on our social media pages.
That’s great and all but I just really wanna know what’s coming in the game!
And that’s totally fair, too! We appreciate that people have been waiting to find out what’s in the box, so to speak, and we’re happy to give a breakdown of what you can look forward to on launch:
- 11 stylized maps representing real cities from all over the world
- Multiple colour palettes per map including night and colourblind modes
- Five road/intersection upgrades to choose between, each offering different strategies to divert, control, and otherwise manage traffic in your city
- Daily and weekly challenges
- Achievements both sensible and not (see if you can get Mom’s Spaghetti)
- A gorgeous procedurally-generated soundtrack by Disasterpiece, who also engineered Mini Metro’s audio. Each map features its own audioscape, including some easter eggs for local flavour
- Photo mode and GIF export so you can show off your cities to your friends
Since launching on Apple Arcade, we’ve maintained a steady stream of content updates and will continue to do so on Steam as well. There are new maps on the horizon as well as different game modes for those who want to play the game primarily to chill out and vibe as well as people who enjoy more competitive play and making their friends beg for mercy on the leaderboards.
We also really appreciate the folks on here who reached out to offer alpha and beta testing - for those who don’t mind a bit of jank under the hood of their Motorways experience, we will keep the testing program open for future patches and content updates, so if you didn’t get a tester key, you haven’t lost your chance. :) We try to keep our testing groups small to ensure individual feedback gets listened to, but as folks move on, go back to school, have kids, or can finally go outside again, we anticipate we’ll always need fresh folks to help test.
I'm a streamer/curator and I'd like a key, too!
We can definitely do that! We're working with the lovely Lena at Stride to handle key distribution so that we can cover more than just the New Zealand time zone. If you fill out our press/media inquiry form, we'll get your details to her and she can sort you out with a key.
Thanks so much for your interest! You can find the form here.
Upcoming Events
As one last bit of news, we'll be at PAX East Online this year! Tana will be joining our Community Lead Casey Lucas-Quaid and a selection of other devs, streamers, and a science fiction author to Imagine Better Worlds Through Games, where we look at how games and science fiction can help us conquer engineering problems of the present. We'll see you there from 15th to 18th July, and you can view programme information here!
Since that's just before our launch weekend - and what is a PAX without swag? - there will be opportunities to win Steam gift cards, keys for both Mini Motorways and Mini Metro, and more! We'll be posting about all that here beforehand so you won't miss your chance. :)
Thanks for reading and see you soon!