I just had a situation where relaying the line for a loop route reset the trains direction (at the worst possible moment haha).

Not sure if intentional or bug. The train had not reached any of the stations affected by the re-routing so should have continued on it's merry way without resetting I would have thought. It was a very odd loop with a large zig-zag section which is what I think caused the reset.

If you come across a similar situation again, could you please email me a screenshot and a brief description of what happened? That'd be a great help!

There actually is pause functionality in the build already. It's not advertised anywhere, but if you click on the clock you'll pause / resume the clock. We put it in because while we do want Mini Metro to have a hectic vibe when things are getting close, ultimately the game is about efficient routing.

It sounds like the functionality for loop-breaking will need some improvement. Thanks for all your ideas! Funny, I never thought that would be an issue - you never can tell until you start playtesting.

@ryansumo: Good point about the colour scheme. I hadn't thought about the confusion. The design for the upgrades screen was something I rushed for the alpha - prior to that it was all ugly placeholder images. It still is placeholder actually (we want icons instead of text). Colours for the UI are a bit of a problem. The lines use the bulk of colour in entire game. Different maps will have different colour schemes, so at any point the screen will be filled with 0 - 5 bold, strongly contrasting colours. Neither of us are graphic designers, so we have no idea how to pick UI colours that can work under those conditions! What I did was cop out and pick three colours from each colour theme, one positive colour (green for the London theme), one negative (red) and one neutral (yellow). These are mainly used for the buttons on the dialogs (negative for destructive actions, positive for play / resume / etc.) For the buttons I guess it's ok that they match the line colours because they're modal. At the last minute I decided to use them for the upgrade icon colours as well. In hindsight it wasn't the best idea!

@billyboob: Thanks for that report, and sorry for messing up your game! The game does check for connectivity before it spawns a station across a river, but the algorithm is a little crude to say the least. I did wonder if it would generate false positives as I was coding it. Now I know!

@permanent: Ta! iOS is definitely on the list of target platforms. I've got it running on my iPad mini, and I think it'll be the best platform to play it on. The geo looks super-sharp on the high-res screen. There are a couple of usability issues to resolve: the handles are going to be tricky to pick up reliably when the game zooms out, and the button hovers need to be changed.

@oyog: Upgrades appear at the end of each week - Sunday night / Monday morning.

Heh. Got so into the game I didn't bother scrolling the rest of the way down the page. Thanks.

Fair enough, it is a silly place to put the instructions. Thank you for highlighting that the upgrade screen isn't entirely clear. It was going to be modified before release anyway, now I'll make sure it's clearer that it signifies the end of one week and start of the next.

When you have a loop route there's only the single handle. Is there a way the player can decide which way around the loop they want to make changes to the route e.g. lmb for clockwise, rmb for counter?

At the moment, no, when you grab the handle it removes the last link that was placed on the line. That's a great idea though! I hadn't thought of using the right mouse button.

It's been tricky designing the interface, we want to keep it minimal and elegant but that can come at a cost of intuitiveness. We don't want to put lots of little handles and widgets and buttons on the screen, although that would make aspects of line editing easier.

We decided to go ahead and push alpha3 live with just the crash fixes. Tutorials and balance changes will wait for the next release.

@oyog: Upgrades appear at the end of each week - Sunday night / Monday morning.

@AegarPyke: Thanks for the screenshot and the description! I just fixed an infinite loop for alpha2, and it appears the fix introduced a far more common crash.

Top priority now is fixing that crash! We have a couple more alterations we'd like to make before the alpha3 build goes up - some balancing changes and in-game tutorials.

@Keen: Glad you like it! There will be levels but not in the Angry Birds sense, more like Super Crate Box. The level in the alpha is based on London, we've done NYC, and we'll most likely ship with at least Paris and Wellington (our home town) as well. Each will have a different upgrade path, colours, and geography.

I'd thought about adding a zen mode pretty much identical to what you'd described, even down to the scoring! The stations would spawn more slowly as they filled up, so to maximise your score you'd have to get trains passing through them as often as possible. We'll definitely look at adding that if we have time. Good to hear there's interest in the idea.

Gutted to hear about the infinite loop, I just quashed what I hoped was the last one. Are you playing the most recent build, alpha2? If so, and you come across the bug again, could you please email me a screenshot at [email protected]?

Hey Ryan! Yeah it's been consuming most of my free time for the last far too many months. Just told Rob you said hi, he says hi back.

Wow great concept! I like the idea of games with a greater purpose that manage to also still be good, fun games. Hope you guys pull it off!

The one change I would make based on reading your design so far would be to remove the morality meter (or at least its visibility). I think attributes like morality and ethics, which are impossible to quantify in the real world, should work similarly in games. The player's conscience should penalise them, rather than discrete, obvious repercussions from within the game.

[Alpha build]

Alpha build

We've finally cleaned up all our horrific placeholder assets to the point where we can publish an alpha build. It's available in the usual place.

Usability

The feedback we got from the first alpha build gave us some very useful usability feedback. The usual stuff you expect when a game's been in closed development with no playtesting for a few months! The hitboxes on the stations were too small. Nowhere did we tell the player how  many lines they had available or could unlock, which drastically affected how they chose upgrades. The click detection is a little gammy. When stations spawn on top of existing lines, it looks as though the station is connected to the line. Lots of little things like that, issues I may have been aware of but, as a coder, managed to explain away to prevent myself from doing work.

Most of the issues have easy fixes that are now live in the updated alpha, others will require a little more work.

Balance

We're still working on getting the upgrades and train speeds and capacities working well together. As it stands, for example, the carriage upgrade is in all ways inferior to taking an extra line. We're playing around with some ideas on how to change the upgrades so there isn't a dominant strategy. I'd like the end-of-week upgrade selection to be a difficult choice no matter which two you're presented with.

I'll second everyone else's praise - love the concept and the art style. I've had a thing for simultaneous turns ever since playing hotseat Combat Mission with my brother. The drama! The suspense! Really keen on getting my hands on a playable build.

And congrats on the press you guys have been getting recently. 

@travisofarabia: Hey thanks for giving the build a go, glad you liked it! Hopefully we'll have that up-to-date build out soon.

@Gorman: Ta Gorms! That's exactly the kind of gamefeel we're going for. If anything the current build is more hectic; we want to make the player feel never quite on top of things, a finger-in-the-dam scenario.

[Mini Metro]

Mini Metro
Make the trains run on time.

Elevator pitch
Mini Metro is a minimalistic subway layout game. When you start, your small city has only three unconnected stations. Your job is to draw routes between the stations to connect them with subway lines. Everything but the line layout is handled automatically; trains run along the lines as quickly as they can, and the commuters decide on the best trains to board and where to make transfers. So there's no need to worry about all that boring stuff.

As the city grows and changes, more and more stations pop up and you have to build new lines, adapt old lines or retire them completely. The game ends when one station has been overcrowded (contains more than five passengers) for too long. Each game is relatively quick, around 5 minutes, and longer once you're more skilled.

Alpha build

> Latest build (Unity webplayer) <

The playable alpha build has just been updated and is available here. Drag between thea shapes (stations) to connect them with a route. Extend routes by dragging the terminator. Shrink routes by dragging the terminator back over the last station. That's it! The next thing on my to-do list is to ship an updated alpha build, so fingers crossed it shouldn't be too long before that's out.

Development
Mini Metro started out as Mind the Gap, a jam entry in Ludum Dare 26. It's been in progress since then and really should be out by now but it isn't because gamedev. But it's getting there!

Mini Metro is being developed in Unity using Matt Rix's Futile framework, and is targetting tablet and desktop platforms, and anything else it makes sense to put it on to. It plays well on an iPad and iPad mini and is playable on monster 6" Androids.

The game is *mostly* done. The game itself is all-but coded (just a couple of bugs to sort out). We're working on game balance and pacing right now. Still to do is audio (got some great things planned here), in-game icons, final UI, and I'm sure countless other little things that I haven't even thought of yet.

The Dinosaur Polo Club website has a few articles about the development process. I wouldn't call it a devlog exactly, more a collection of random thoughts about Mini Metro and our game development experience in general.

Devlog
I hope to update this thread every week at least with progress we've made, and responding to feedback when I get the opportunity. We'll see how that goes; work is mainly part-time so there may be some lean weeks.

As always, any feedback is appreciated! Thanks for checking us out.

website - me on Twitter - Dinosaur Polo Club on Twitter - Greenlight