Mini Motorways News

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!

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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!!

[h2]What is Mini Motorways again?[/h2]

Mini Motorways, like its spiritual-if-not-exact prequel Mini Metro, is a minimalist strategy sim about diverting and managing traffic to meet the demands of a growing city. Players will be working against time, congestion, geography, and the city's own growth while they attempt to manage the road network and keep the city moving.

[h2]After the public transport-minded Mini Metro, why make a game about cars?[/h2]

While anyone who interacts with any of us couldn’t possibly deny that we are, shall we say, train enthusiasts, we thought there was interesting ground to explore in the concept of a highway game. (Or, as we call them in New Zealand and some other parts of the world - motorways!)

Highways, at least in most cities that aren’t very new, tend to have interesting spatial challenges both from a geographic and an urban standpoint. Most motorway systems were developed long after the cities that host them were already built, so road planners are working not only against the geographical constraints that we represented in Mini Metro (hills, coastlines) but also against the city’s own pre-existing blueprint.

While the minimalist art style of Mini Motorways doesn’t go so far as to label things “heritage district” or “historical landmark” or “giant skyscraper that is Extremely In The Way,” the challenges of building placement in this game are meant to emulate those real life issues that city planners have to work around.

[h2]This sounds kind of neat! I wanna learn more![/h2]

Our programmer and designer Tana Tanoi gave a fantastic talk at GCAP Melbourne last year where he goes into the theory and practice of attempting to create a “spiritual successor” to Mini Metro that wasn’t just the same ol’ same ol’ but with cars. You can watch it here.

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We also go into the game's design philosophy in this episode of the Controller Disconnected podcast for #LoveIndies week. While the pandemic has interrupted #LoveIndies for 2021, we still put some material together and will be sharing it both here and on our social media pages.

[h2]That’s great and all but I just really wanna know what’s coming in the game![/h2]

And that’s totally fair, too! We appreciate that people have been waiting to find out what’s in the box, so to speak, and we’re happy to give a breakdown of what you can look forward to on launch:

• 11 stylized maps representing real cities from all over the world
  
• Multiple colour palettes per map including night and colourblind modes
  
• Five road/intersection upgrades to choose between, each offering different strategies to divert, control, and otherwise manage traffic in your city
  
• Daily and weekly challenges
  
• Achievements both sensible and not (see if you can get Mom’s Spaghetti)
  
• A gorgeous procedurally-generated soundtrack by Disasterpiece, who also engineered Mini Metro’s audio. Each map features its own audioscape, including some easter eggs for local flavour
  
• Photo mode and GIF export so you can show off your cities to your friends
  

Since launching on Apple Arcade, we’ve maintained a steady stream of content updates and will continue to do so on Steam as well. There are new maps on the horizon as well as different game modes for those who want to play the game primarily to chill out and vibe as well as people who enjoy more competitive play and making their friends beg for mercy on the leaderboards.

We also really appreciate the folks on here who reached out to offer alpha and beta testing - for those who don’t mind a bit of jank under the hood of their Motorways experience, we will keep the testing program open for future patches and content updates, so if you didn’t get a tester key, you haven’t lost your chance. :) We try to keep our testing groups small to ensure individual feedback gets listened to, but as folks move on, go back to school, have kids, or can finally go outside again, we anticipate we’ll always need fresh folks to help test.

[h2]I'm a streamer/curator and I'd like a key, too![/h2]

We can definitely do that! We're working with the lovely Lena at Stride to handle key distribution so that we can cover more than just the New Zealand time zone. If you fill out our press/media inquiry form, we'll get your details to her and she can sort you out with a key.

Thanks so much for your interest! You can find the form here.

[h2]Upcoming Events[/h2]

As one last bit of news, we'll be at PAX East Online this year! Tana will be joining our Community Lead Casey Lucas-Quaid and a selection of other devs, streamers, and a science fiction author to Imagine Better Worlds Through Games, where we look at how games and science fiction can help us conquer engineering problems of the present. We'll see you there from 15th to 18th July, and you can view programme information here!

Since that's just before our launch weekend - and what is a PAX without swag? - there will be opportunities to win Steam gift cards, keys for both Mini Motorways and Mini Metro, and more! We'll be posting about all that here beforehand so you won't miss your chance. :)

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Mini Motorways was announced back in 2019, but the road vehicle successor to the puzzling trains of Mini Metro has been in Apple Arcade jail ever since. It now has a release date for its launch on Steam: July 20th. There's a new trailer below, too.

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