Mini Motorways News

It’s been a wonderfully chaotic day with the launch of Mini Motorways on Steam! It’s been amazing to see so many of you get your hands on all the new maps and features we’ve been working on and we’re so grateful for the continued support and enthusiasm.

Inevitably there have been a couple of issues with the new builds and we’ve spent the day buckling down to get these resolved for everyone as soon as possible! See below for all the things we’ve been busy under the hood fixing:

• Motorway placement has been adjusted so that they can be used easily on maps with mountains. You’ll see this is most noticeable on Rio de Janeiro!
  
• We fixed the issue that was causing some players games to get stuck on the opening grid screen on macOS 10.13 and 10.14.
  
• Fixed the thumbnail that appears on Mexico City on the map select screen when playing in colourblind and night mode
  
• Steam locale will now favour whatever you have set as your preferred Steam locale, rather than the default.
  
• Fixed a per-frame memory leak from the TileView. This will improve performance in some instances where the game was taking up excessive system resources.
  
• Fixed some silent exceptions that were triggering in the tutorial.
  

Thanks to everyone who sent reports and logs! If you encounter further issues, please keep the reports coming to [email protected]!

We hope you're ready to hit the road! We are overwhelmed with gratitude at all the excitement, and so we don't get too embarrassing with our speeches, we'll keep it short and sweet: MINI MOTORWAYS IS NOW AVAILABLE ON STEAM!

We've got some stickied posts over in our discussions area for commonly asked questions and for you to show off your cities. We can't wait to see what you build!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Inspired by real-world engineering?
Fancy yourself a bit of a traffic fixer?
Just here for Disasterpeace's gorgeous ambient soundtrack?

We're glad to have you however you found yourselves here!

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Update on bugs in older versions of macOS
We have pushed a patch live as of now that fixes this issue as well as a few smaller bugs! Keep on firing through reports over in the discussions area and we'll keep working on them all launch week. Thanks so much for your help in reporting these and for sending in your logs!

A final note...
We are beyond stoked with how our first day has gone. We'll be checking in later to let you know what type of support you can expect in the coming weeks and months - updates, planned features, and more!

Enjoy Mini Motorways everyone! We'll be running events and showcasing player creations all week, so post your creations in our stickied thread or tag us on social media with #MiniMotorways and we'd love to show off some of your work!

Have a wonderful day stuck in traffic. :)

It's hard to believe that the day is almost here. The day is winding down here in New Zealand, and by the time we wake up, Mini Motorways will be live on Steam! (Bold of us to assume we'll sleep.) We've been overwhelmed by the love and support from the Steam community - thanks so much to everyone who has watched our dev streams, chilled with us at PAX, and streamed the game in our prelaunch sneak peeks!

We'll be launching at 8:00am Pacific Time, and if you can't wait that long to get a peek, we've got some amazing videos from our community that you can explore in the meantime. :)

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We'll be opening a special launch party Discord server tomorrow, too! We'll be sharing community creations, running giveaways, popping in with streams and an in-office camera feed, and more. We'll pop the link live in a Steam event once we're up and running in our office in New Zealand (again, presuming we sleep).

We'll leave you until the morning with a video from one of the first people to ever discover and stream Mini Metro back in the day. It's been such a joy to reconnect with so many of you that took a chance on our little game at PAX, IndieCade, GDC, and on streaming over the last several years. We will never forget the people who helped make Mini Metro and now Mini Motorways into the games they are today and we are beyond thrilled to share this next chapter of our studio's adventure with you!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If the brilliant Mini Metro gave me a newfound admiration for city subway designers, then Dinosaur Polo Club's latest minimalist transport sim Mini Motorways proves that urban road planners are actual god tier human beings.

Even with some of today's most iconic conurbations such as LA, Tokyo and Dubai reduced to their neatest, simplest geographical lines and land masses, I still manage to make a pig's ear of laying down a functioning road network. Just when I think I've got a handle on ferrying each city's busy commuters between their homes and giant industrial centres, something inevitably goes wrong. The pins stack up, jams back up for miles, and gridlock eventually brings the whole city to a crashing halt. But by golly is it fun.

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The day is drawing ever closer and we are working our tails off (spiky stegosaurus or big clubby akylosaurus, your choice) to line everything up for launch! Early content creator keys have gone out, the build is wrapped up tight with a nice little bow for Valve, and we are so excited to finally share the product of the last 18 months of hard work with you all.

We are so thrilled to share that the lovely KatherineOfSky has put together an awesome introductory video to the Steam edition of the game. She's also got some excellent beginner tips for new players, or if you're an existing player, you can preview some of our new features below!

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[h3]Answers to some common questions...[/h3]
We've put together a pre-launch FAQ over on the forums, but we wanted to share a few of the more common requests below to ensure everyone who's asked can get the answers they need!

What time will the game be launching?
8:00am Pacific time on the 20th of July! (Sorry, fellow New Zealanders, that's 2am for us...)

How often do you plan to offer updates?
Good news, we're already working on our next one! We roll out new maps every few months, same as we have with Mini Metro over the years. We also have additional game modes planned. We hope to eventually offer the same breadth of game modes that Mini Metro has (something for the creative/endless mode players and an extreme mode), although they may be slightly different as we'll have to tweak things for performance reasons.

I'm a content creator, can I get a key?
Sure thing! The lovely Lena at Stride PR is handling key distribution for us.
You can fill out their form here.

Do you have a policy about whether or not content creators can monetise our videos?
We have a catch-all license on our site, but the tl;dr of it is that anyone can make Mini Motorways videos and monetise them. We don't require people to individually email for permission and we definitely don't police which regions people stream from. That sounds like a lot of work and also not particularly friendly! You can read the policy on our press kit page here.

The extended version of the FAQ has a lot more answers within!

[h3]You said there's a way to win a copy?![/h3]
We'll be giving away some copies of the game, some Steam gift cards, and a biiiig prize leading up to launch week. Details over on our Twitter feed. If you're planning to attend PAX online, we'll also be hosting some giveaways there!

Shacknews has a great breakdown of how to watch what when it comes to PAX. Our panel, Imagining Better Worlds Through Games will air on Sunday, July 18th, from 6.30-7.30 PM EST. We'll also be hopping in and out of the PAX Online Discord so if you're around, come say hi! We miss seeing everyone face to face, but until the world settles down, this is the next best thing.

We have been overwhelmed by the response and interest to the game in the week leading up to launch--we hope you'll like it as much as we love working on it! SEE YOU SOON!!