We’ve said this before, but this time it’s for realsies. The mobile build of Mini Metro on the home stretch! We’ve one last sprint to go before we submit, packed with a ton of little tasks and tidy-ups to do over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve put together a list of things that you’ll probably be interested in if you’re an existing player who’s thinking of picking it up on mobile at launch.
- We will do our best to ensure a simultaneous release across iOS and Android.
- The mobile game will be very familiar if you’ve played it on desktop. The majority of changes have been to improve playability on small touch screens.
- You can pinch-zoom and pan around the map. We tried a number of different strategies before implementing this, and I wish we’d done it sooner. It feels natural given that the game is a map and makes editing lines in a busy city easy.
- It’s playable in landscape only. We toyed with the idea of supporting one-handed, portrait play but Mini Metro requires too much fidelity of interaction to handle that well.
- Unless we have a serious change of heart over the next few weeks, Mini Metro will be a paid app with no ads or in-app purchases. This was a difficult decision, but ultimately we decided that we couldn’t make it work well as a freemium app without a significant redesign. We know this means it won’t be nearly as accessible as it could be.
- Never say never though! We’re not ruling out microtransactions for big content updates in the future.
- The initial release will have Normal and Extreme modes, but not Endless. We’re not happy with how Endless mode currently works, so rather than ship with it as is, we will redesign it and add it post-launch (and update the desktop build). How soon that happens depends on how smoothly the launch goes!
- iCloud is supported.
- Statistics aren’t available during or after the game. That screen isn’t as interesting as we hoped it would be, so we decided to not spend the time making it usable on tiny screens.
So close now. After all this time it finally feels like we’re on top of things. More news to come soon!