5/7/2023 0 Comments Mini metro browser![]() It was front-and-center on the index page, not hidden away behind a button. We designed the website around the web player. The first release of Mini Metro’s playable alpha was in September 2013. Lucas Pope had released betas of the game during development while it’s impossible to know how that impacted the eventual sales, it obviously didn’t preclude commercial success. The game we had in the back of our minds was Papers, Please. In the weeks afterwards, when we were discussing how to continue development, we reasoned that keeping it freely playable up to release, and possibly even after release, wouldn’t be such a bad idea. So almost from the game’s inception it was freely playable online. "It’s impossible to know for sure, but we don’t think Dinosaur Polo Club would be operating now if it wasn’t for that web-playable build." We chose to use Unity for our Ludum Dare entry because of the high uptake of the Unity Web Player-like most entrants, we wanted as many people to play our game as possible, and reasoned that a game playable in the browser would get more attention than a downloadable executable. As it is, Mini Metro has kept us busy for over three years! 2) Giving the game away Any concept we couldn’t have fully prototyped in two days would have been too much for us to fully develop. Prototyping in a game jam wasn’t something we consciously decided on, but in hindsight it gave us our most important constraint. While we discussed a number of ideas that fit within the constraints, we didn’t prototype anything until Ludum Dare 26 in April 2013. ![]() Themes that kept recurring in our concepts were procedural levels and abstract visual styles. Not only could we immediately discard 90% of our potential ideas without agonizing for days over the viability of each one, but the constraints themselves inspired ideas. One thing we immediately found is how ironically liberating it is operating within tight constraints. We outlined the following hard constraints that any concept would need to fit within: No talent at PR and business, and not much drive to get better at it.A pedantic streak, which can mean getting distracted for long periods on trivial tasks.Only a handful of hours a day for development.A pedantic streak, which helps tremendously when adding the final polish to a title.A long history of playing board games, tabletop wargames, and video games.Good at executing simple, consistent graphic design.Plenty of professional game programming experience.We enumerated our many constraints, and drew up a list of the corresponding restrictions we had to put on any game concept. So we deliberately chose a project that fit within our constraints. Robert had a full-time job, and didn't have the capacity to come home from his programming job and write even more code at home. For the first time he was aware of how small in scope a game would have to be for him to complete it - he had about an hour and a half during the afternoon when his son had a nanny, and a couple more hours every evening. He had a string of half-completed engines and game ideas that were never even started, but wanted to make and actually release a game. In 2013, when Mini Metro was born, Peter had just started a family with his wife Mary and was a stay-at-home dad. The original Ludum Dare entry for Mini Metro It’s even in the title! Both of us, Peter and Robert, had worked in the game industry over a decade ago and had since spent a lot of time developing games at home, but had only ever abandoned projects rather than released them. Mini Metro is a game defined by its scope. So postmortem is a bit of a misnomer, as the project is anything but dead! THINGS THAT WENT WELL 1) Scope It took ten months to take to Greenlight, another sixteen months to release, and is currently in development for mobile. Mini Metro was prototyped in a weekend over three years ago. It has met with commercial success as well as enjoying a run on the festival and awards circuit, culminating in four nominations and one win at the 2016 IGF Awards and one nomination at the BAFTA Games Awards.
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