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[rek]

I think you have a hit on your hand, your game is showing up in non-game/tech local blogs now

[Bandreus]

Congrats! Glad the DevlogMag mention acted as a lucky charm for you guys

All the media exposure is definitely well deserved, just make sure your web servers don't go BOOM 

[josh_s]

Brilliant and original game. Harry Beck would've been proud. I think you've got the right balance of realism (modelling a real metro system) and abstraction (modifying that system enough to make a good game).

Took me a while to figure out that you could reroute and decommission lines easily.

I think the balance of the game needs tweaking a bit. The early stage is a bit slow once you're experienced so it would be good to be able to speed this up a little with a fast-forward button.

I found that thinks quickly went from manageable to out of control at around the 350-400 trips mark (on the London map). It might be good to somehow smooth out this transition.

I think you are going to ship a lot of copies of this game, it has immediate storefront appeal.

[squibbons]

Very cool game. Played it for a bit this morning, and quite enjoyed it. I love traffic management in games, oddly enough, and this is right up my alley in that regard. Looking forward to where you take this. =)

[mallen]

Hi all,

Just a few questions, as I couldn't find anything on this on the dinopolo website:

1. What are the system requirements? (target, minimum, etc.)
2. Why does the standalone installer want to connect to the internet?
3. Does this involve Steam? I wouldn't be willing to install Steam even if my machine wasn't a standalone.
4. The software won't install. It seems to be a DX-related issue. I've tried Win 32/SP3 and Win x64/SP2c though, again, my machine isn't internet-connected.

Thanks. Looks like an interesting project!

[RLofC]

Played the demo and loved it
Minimal, Zen-ish and fun. I look forward to the soundtrack. You most certainly have my vote

[Cloudiest Nights]

You made it on Rock, Paper, Shotgun! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/10/mini-metro-subway-game/

[locknic]

Man, this really surprised me. I went in not expecting much, and ended up playing it for over two hours!

Edit: Man... I keep coming back to this...

[billyboob]

boingboing'd. nice.

[TheMonkeyTail]

I loved this game

[flap]

Hello, I loved Mind the Gap, and am delighted to see that you keeped developping it.

A suggestion for later version : what if there were factories and you had to move goods around ? Goods arriving in a factory would be processed into something else, and finally sold.

[X-ray]

That's looking awesome! "Please mind the gap"

[galluci]

Insanely addictive. Keep it up!

[blip]

Found a bug that causes the mac (alpha 7a) to freezup.

When moving the green line to the cross station (top right), the game froze after releasing the mouse button.

The t-bar adjustment handle did not appear, all the trains stopped moving, and of course the cursor beachballed.

[peterc_nz]

Wow I didn't mean to take so long between updates! Things have just gone absolutely nuts since the press started up. Most of my dev time over the last three weeks has been spent replying to emails and tweets, but we have managed to get a couple of updated alphas out.

Greenlight
Mini Metro was among the 75 titles released from Greenlight on the 20th of March. It was amazing to get through so quickly - like everyone else we'd heard the horror stories and assumed we'd be stuck in there for months. We had a fairly good reception from the initial surge of people coming to the Greenlight page from Steam - 55% yes votes, which is about average from what I've heard, maybe 10% 'lol flash gaem' comments.

Just as our traffic was tapering off, the first of the big articles went up and interest in the game shot up. We had a second spike of visitors to the Greenlight page - not as much as the initial peak, but this time they were already interested in the game. Visitors you bring to Greenlight vote and comment MUCH higher than the average! We had a third spike when Kotaku and Gizmodo featured Mini Metro on the same day.

Feedback
What all this means is that we're now designing for an audience! Any time we make changes to the game, we'll start receiving the feedback within minutes - this makes iteration daunting. And we have been making many changes, so a huge task has been going through all the comments and deciding whether we made the best decision. It's great having so many eyeballs on the game, but it's making us second guess everything.

alpha8
The most recent alpha streamlined the upgrade system and introduced multiple independent cars running on the same line. Instead of giving out semi-random upgrades every week, we gave out a choice between the same selection of three upgrades every time the player reaches a milestone of delivered passengers. As the clock was not required, it was ditched.

From a balance perspective, I think this was all a step in the right direction. The extra railcar capacity and extra line upgrades were all rolled into the much more flexible and generic railcar, which could be used to start a new line, or add capacity and frequency to an existing line. Timing the upgrades to milestones instead of the clock meant we could vary the time between upgrades.

But the game's lost something. The loss of the clock means it's not tied to the rhythms of the day. The less rigid upgrades mean people can be a little lost - they get a railcar, sooo ... what now? And I think a huge part of the appeal that I hadn't considered is the randomness of the upgrades each week. By making the options fixed, we took out that little thrill you'd get at the end of each week.

So we're reconsidering our direction for alpha9. There are some good aspects of the previous two alphas that we want to keep - in particular running independent cars on a line has proved to be crucial for making long lines more viable - but we will be backtracking on some changes.

[peterc_nz]

1. What are the system requirements? (target, minimum, etc.)
2. Why does the standalone installer want to connect to the internet?
3. Does this involve Steam? I wouldn't be willing to install Steam even if my machine wasn't a standalone.
4. The software won't install. It seems to be a DX-related issue. I've tried Win 32/SP3 and Win x64/SP2c though, again, my machine isn't internet-connected.

1. I think Unity requires a DX9-level graphics card. We haven't done any official speccing yet.
2. The standalone builds make one HTTP request to the server when they start (to http://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/version.php) to request the name of the current version. It uses that to alert you if there's an updated alpha build.
3. It isn't being distributed through Steam yet.
4. Do you mean the standalone won't run, or the webplayer won't install? The standalone shouldn't need internet access to run, it just won't do the version check. That said, I haven't actually tried it without internet access ...

[flap]

Congratulation to your success.

But the game's lost something. The loss of the clock means it's not tied to the rhythms of the day. The less rigid upgrades mean people can be a little lost - they get a railcar, sooo ... what now? And I think a huge part of the appeal that I hadn't considered is the randomness of the upgrades each week. By making the options fixed, we took out that little thrill you'd get at the end of each week.

So we're reconsidering our direction for alpha9. There are some good aspects of the previous two alphas that we want to keep - in particular running independent cars on a line has proved to be crucial for making long lines more viable - but we will be backtracking on some changes.

Maybe add a day night cycle with less people in the mid of the night, a rush hours in the morning/evening

[rek]

Feedback
What all this means is that we're now designing for an audience! Any time we make changes to the game, we'll start receiving the feedback within minutes - this makes iteration daunting. And we have been making many changes, so a huge task has been going through all the comments and deciding whether we made the best decision. It's great having so many eyeballs on the game, but it's making us second guess everything.

You have an audience now, but it's your game. Ignore any comment that doesn't jive with your vision and goal, and keep an eye out for suggestions that introduce design drift in the guise of minor tweaks to the existing gameplay.

alpha8
The most recent alpha streamlined the upgrade system and introduced multiple independent cars running on the same line. Instead of giving out semi-random upgrades every week, we gave out a choice between the same selection of three upgrades every time the player reaches a milestone of delivered passengers. As the clock was not required, it was ditched.

From a balance perspective, I think this was all a step in the right direction. The extra railcar capacity and extra line upgrades were all rolled into the much more flexible and generic railcar, which could be used to start a new line, or add capacity and frequency to an existing line. Timing the upgrades to milestones instead of the clock meant we could vary the time between upgrades.

I've only played once in the last two or three weeks, and have to say when I encountered that upgrade I wasn't sure what it meant, so I opted for something I knew I needed.

[peterc_nz]

Found a bug that causes the mac (alpha 7a) to freezup.

Thanks! I just got a very similar screenshot of this crash occurring to somebody else. This'll hopefully give me enough to repro with.

[flap]

A suggestion : Statistics

It could be interresting to get various real time and global statistics, such as :
- Load ratio (percentage of used seats in the cars) (can be displayed at the network level, a line, or a station)
- Average transport distance (Average distance crossed by each traveller, can be given at network level, or for a station, for the travellers going from or to the station, or at network level per passenger categories))
- Average waiting time (at network, line or station level)
- Number of people in transit (people change line at a given station. It could be a the network, line or station level)

These data could be provided real time, or the average/sum during the whole game (It could also be plotted against time).