Meet Mini Motorways! The team has been hard at work on this game since early 2018 and we’re so happy that we can share our work with you all after so many months after today’s announcement that it’s coming soon to Apple Arcade on the 19th of September.
Following up Mini Metro
The success of our debut title, Mini Metro, took us all by surprise. We have spent most of the time since its inception supporting it by adding more content, bringing it to new platforms, and improving the core systems (a fancy way of saying “fixing bugs”). It’s also been a hard title to follow up. We have spent a lot of time deciding what to base our next game on, and we decided on something else that a lot of people use every day – road maps.
Prototyping
We did a lot of work on Mini Metro in 2018, such as adding Creative Mode, the interactive game guide, and new maps. In between these updates we set aside time for members of the team to prototype ideas for how an interactive road map would work. In some concepts the roads drew themselves automatically and you carved arterial routes through them, in others you painted roads across the city and they “sprouted” small streets. We experimented with systems such as modelling the waves of commuters throughout the day, intelligent spline editing, and threading together interchanges. In the end we kept coming back to one of the concepts, Tiny Tileways, that our programmers Tana and Tom had put together. It was a neat and minimal design, fun to watch and interact with, and had a lot of potential for expansion.
Apple Arcade
We were several months into pre-production when Apple approached us about including the title in Apple Arcade. We always knew that Apple’s platforms would be a strong market for us – the success of Mini Metro on iOS was what allowed Dinosaur Polo Club to expand in the first place. So after hearing their pitch we were never in much doubt! Premium games have a tough time in today’s mobile marketplace, and Apple Arcade struck us a great way to keep making the types of games that we want to make while also giving us the potential to reach far more players than before. Plus having a game already about to start production meant we could be part of the launch, which was too big of an opportunity to pass up.
Apple Arcade is available right now on the iOS 13 beta, with a general release coming on the 19th of September. It’s coming to tvOS and iPadOS on 30th of September, and macOS in October.
Steam
However we have not forgotten our Steam audience! Mini Metro debuted on Steam and Mini Motorways will find a home on the platform as well. We would have loved to launch on Steam at the same time, but we are a small team and had to focus on the Apple Arcade version to make it into the launch line-up. Alongside supporting the live game and fixing any issues that pop up, we’re currently striving to make Mini Motorways feel at home on Steam and instead of rushing the integration, we’re taking the time to do it right and deliver a great game first time to our fans on Steam. You can check out our coming soon page and if you like the look of it, please add to your wishlist!