Mini Motorways News

Does a perfect video game actually exist? I think there’s a strong argument for the idea that a truly perfect game - or any piece of art, for that matter - can never really happen. There’s too many factors at play. With that said, every now and then a game pops up that I truly cannot lay any significant fault at - and one such release is Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Motorways.

Originally released via Apple Arcade and now available on PC, the concept of the game is blissfully, eighties-design era simple. You create a city, but this isn’t a typical city builder: all you have to do is craft the road system. Buildings large and small crop up as time progresses, and your job is simply to connect everything up in a sensible manner that encourages further growth.

You have a limited amount of roads and accessories such as roundabouts, traffic lights, bridges, and of course motorways at any given time. Your job is to carefully juggle the needs of the city with the resources you have, producing a layout that minimizes traffic jams. Buildings are color coded - so blue homes will spit out cars of the same color that need to make their way to blue businesses - and therefore quickly the game’s randomly spawning infrastructure will force you to make hard decisions about moving around resources to keep the city moving. If things get too clogged up, it’s game over.

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The August 24th patch included a minor bug fix to delete mode which introduced unexpected behaviour with touchscreen input on some devices. As the changes that introduced these issues should not have impacted wider touchscreen performance and we don’t know how many devices were potentially affected, we have simply removed these changes. The patch is otherwise the same as the previous version released today. Please let us know if you experience any odd behaviour with mouse, touchscreen, or Surface Pen input that was not present in prior versions! :)

Bug fixes:

• We have fixed the issue where the game would get stuck on the initial loading screen and nothing was visible but the spinning loading icon.
  
• We have fixed the situation where some players were only seeing a black screen, but could still hear and interact with the game. We have added in OpenGL support for when players don’t support DirectX 11 or Metal.
  
• Similar to above, players who are experiencing crashes when they play can now set the launch options to -force-glcore to force the game to start up in OpenGL.
  
• We have fixed the bug with achievements which prevented them from occasionally unlocking. Any achievements you’ve unlocked will be retroactively awarded on Steam when you launch the game.
  
• Fixed a car stalling bug that could happen when a car tried to do a u-turn on a mothballed lane.
  
• We’ve stretched out the End of Week upgrade screen transition animation to help minimise chance for players to accidentally select an upgrade before you can read the options.
  

Design updates/fixes:

• We have added a popup on the Map Select screen for when you try to play a game while you’ve already got a saved game in progress. This should reduce the number of instances where players accidentally overwrite an in-progress game.
  
• Three-way intersections now count properly as intersections and cars will slow down accordingly when passing through them. The fact that they did not before was a bug rather than an intentional design choice.
  
• Increased base intersection speed slightly - this is to help counterbalance the change to three-way intersections.
  
• Tweaks to how often certain upgrades are offered.
  
• Rebalanced traffic lights to change faster / more frequently so as to be more effective. Cars that observe the American red light right hand turn rules no longer effect traffic light change decisions.
  
• Balance passes on both Manila and Rio to continue to spawn destinations late-game and avoid a plateau which can lead to infinitely looping games - there was a bug in spawn behaviour that was causing spawns to appear less frequently than on other maps.
  

Bug fixes:

• We have fixed the issue where the game would get stuck on the initial loading screen and nothing was visible but the spinning loading icon.
  
• We have fixed the situation where some players were only seeing a black screen, but could still hear and interact with the game. We have added in OpenGL support for when players don’t support DirectX 11 or Metal.
  
• Similar to above, players who are experiencing crashes when they play can now set the launch options to -force-glcore to force the game to start up in OpenGL.
  
• We have fixed the bug with achievements which prevented them from occasionally unlocking. Any achievements you’ve unlocked will be retroactively awarded on Steam when you launch the game.
  
• Fixed a car stalling bug that could happen when a car tried to do a u-turn on a mothballed lane.
  
• We’ve stretched out the End of Week upgrade screen transition animation to help minimise chance for players to accidentally select an upgrade before you can read the options.
  

Design updates/fixes:

• We have added a popup on the Map Select screen for when you try to play a game while you’ve already got a saved game in progress. This should reduce the number of instances where players accidentally overwrite an in-progress game.
  
• Three-way intersections now count properly as intersections and cars will slow down accordingly when passing through them. The fact that they did not before was a bug rather than an intentional design choice.
  
• Increased base intersection speed slightly - this is to help counterbalance the change to three-way intersections.
  
• Tweaks to how often certain upgrades are offered.
  
• Rebalanced traffic lights to change faster / more frequently so as to be more effective. Cars that observe the American red light right hand turn rules no longer effect traffic light change decisions.
  
• Balance passes on both Manila and Rio to continue to spawn destinations late-game and avoid a plateau which can lead to infinitely looping games - there was a bug in spawn behaviour that was causing spawns to appear less frequently than on other maps.
  

Hi everyone! It’s been a busy last few weeks at Dino HQ after our Steam launch. We dove straight into fixing bugs and providing some quality-of-life improvements, but we wanted to pause for a moment and say something to everyone reading this: thank you. We are completely overwhelmed by the response the Steam community has shown Mini Motorways. We are proud of our game and the work our team has done on it, but nobody ever expects a launch like this! We are so grateful for your support in all the forms it has taken, everything from wishlisting to checking us out at PAX to sharing the game with your friends.

As we begin production work on our next update, we wanted to let you all know what you can expect from the coming months and years of Mini Motorways. We’ve received a lot of questions about what comes next and when it’s coming and we hope this post can quickly address some of those!

[h2]What is your planned update schedule for Mini Motorways going forward?[/h2]
Since it was first launched on Apple Arcade, we have updated Mini Motorways multiple times a year and we intend to keep up this update frequency in the future. We’ve been updating Mini Metro frequently with new game modes, maps, and features like Steam Workshop support consistently since 2015 (and in fact Mini Metro will have a new update in the next month!) and we intend to support Mini Motorways to the same degree. Different updates may take different lengths of time depending on content and complexity, but they will be coming.

[h2]Will Mini Motorways eventually have all the game modes from Mini Metro?[/h2]
Our eventual vision for Mini Motorways includes a selection of game modes like Mini Metro currently offers. They may not be exact replicas of those same game modes in Mini Metro due to differences between the games under the hood, but we want to add game modes that allow players to relax and explore their creativity as well as modes for more challenge-oriented players.

[h2]Will new cities be added to Mini Motorways?[/h2]
Definitely! We will continue adding new cities based on both our own research and player suggestion, as we’ve done with Mini Metro before. Back when Mini Metro first launched, it had only twelve maps, and over the years it’s grown to almost thirty. We love to get suggestions for new cities - feel free to email them to [email protected].

[h2]Will you still be patching the game between updates if I find a bug? What’s the best way to report bugs?[/h2]
Now that the dust has settled on our busy post-launch period, we’ll be getting straight to work on the first of our content updates - we’ll still be patching bugs as they occur, but we’ll be balancing our time between support and new updates. When we’re in production mode, we may not have time to monitor the forums here as closely as we have been but we will still be reviewing posts periodically. If you encounter an urgent issue, please use the support email as those don’t get lost in the scroll! Again, that’s [email protected].


We are so, so excited about what the future has in store for Mini Motorways. Thank you to everyone who has enjoyed the game and given feedback already - we think you’re going to love what we’ve got coming down the road in the future. :)

Updates:

• Fixed an issue with the leaderboards where an entry would be repeated.
  
• Fixed an issue where user resolution selection wasn’t saving when playing in fullscreen mode.
  
• Updated the daily/weekly challenge list to replace a specific day’s challenge.
  

Notes:

• We’ve been working on the fix for achievements not being awarded, but it didn’t make it into the build this time. The plan is for it to retroactively award achievements you should have achieved. Stay tuned!