Mini Motorways News

The Hometown Update included a minor bug which caused the Daily Challenge for the 17th of October to be impossible to play. We have fixed this challenge so it is now playable again.

[h2]Re-posted patch notes from the Hometown Update for reference:[/h2]

Take a trip to our hometown and build the streets of Aotearoa New Zealand’s capital city! This update to Mini Motorways includes:

• A brand new map to explore! You can now recreate our hometown of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) and try your hand at building an efficient road network in one of the world’s windiest cities.
  
• Autosaves! Your games will save automatically at the end of every week
  
• Several bug fixes! We’ve resolved several issues including stalling cars, crashes, and issues with some of the daily challenges.
  

We hope you enjoy exploring our local roads and visiting the city that homes Dinosaur Polo Club. Kia ora!

It’s all in the name, folks! We’re so excited to take you on a tour of our very own hometown, the capital city of New Zealand: Wellington! Te Whanganui a Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) is the home to all of our dinos and is where Mini Motorways was created. We can’t wait to see how you recreate our city! If you look close enough, you might even be able to spot our studio, located in the heart of Wellington’s arts district on Cuba St.

This update features:

• A new map! Wellington, New Zealand.
  
• Improved autosaving.
  
• Improved the way that the game submits scores to the leaderboards. If a score fails to submit, the game will attempt to resubmit the next time it can. Prevents scores from being “lost” if your device loses connection.
  
• The game will automatically save when the end-of-week screen appears.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented any upgrades from showing on the end-of-week screen on some challenges. This fixes the bug where it was possible to get to an end-of-week screen with no update choices while playing certain Daily and Weekly Challenges.
  
• Fixed an issue with traffic lights at busy destinations that prevented cars from leaving.
  
• Refactored the list of Daily and Weekly Challenges to remove "problem challenges" where upgrades and maps would result in games that ended very soon due to lack of bridges/motorways/etc.
  
• Additional bugfixes, UI improvements, and performance improvements.
  
• Updated to the latest version of Unity engine.
  

We're already hard at work on our next update and we can't wait to end 2021 on a high note! Thanks so much for continuing to play and enjoy Mini Motorways. Enjoy Wellington!

Take a trip to our hometown and build the streets of Aotearoa New Zealand’s capital city! This update to Mini Motorways includes:

• A brand new map to explore! You can now recreate our hometown of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) and try your hand at building an efficient road network in one of the world’s windiest cities.
  
• Autosaves! Your games will save automatically at the end of every week
  
• Several bug fixes! We’ve resolved several issues including stalling cars, crashes, and issues with some of the daily challenges.
  

We hope you enjoy exploring our local roads and visiting the city that homes Dinosaur Polo Club. Kia ora!

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.