We pushed the first alpha build of Mini Metro up to the website a week or two ago. It’s been great to have a recent build playable (the pre-alpha had been up since September!). So far it’s only been advertised via Twitter and the TIGSource devlog. This means all the feedback has been from other devs, which is great – we’ve had some very detailed crash reports!
A few key points have come up which we’re going to address over the next few weeks in subsequent builds. The main issues are:
- Line terminators can run off the visible edge of the map.
- The upgrades are not balanced; lines are in all ways superior to carriages, for example.
- No indication as to how many lines are available, which heavily influences upgrade selection.
- The score is not visible.
- Infinite loops are present when scheduling links for removal in certain situations.
- Commuter routing fails to take several factors into account, such as the capacity of a station, which can result in losing the game earlier.
- Click detection can be fiddly.
Except for the infinite loops, which were are surprise (and have since been fixed!), there were no huge issues that we weren’t expecting. Most of the usability issues have been at least addressed (some will be tweaked right up to release), and I’m much happier with the playability of the game now. There are still some rough edges but they’re not as rough as they used to be.