Mini Motorways

by Dinosaur Polo Club

The Developer Says...

Mini Motorways is a strategy simulation game about designing the road map for a growing city. Build a traffic network, one road at a time, to create a bustling metropolis. Redesign your roads and place your motorways to get everyone where they need to go. How long can you keep the city moving?

Players Like...

❤ Objective and Core Gameplay Loop

You must build an efficient road network to transport colored cars from residential houses to their corresponding destination buildings. Strategically placing and connecting roads, as well as utilizing upgrades like roundabouts, highways, and bridges, ensures cars can reach their destinations before the buildings become overwhelmed. The gameplay loop involves spawning colored houses, each containing 2 cars, and matching colored destination buildings around the map. You build roads to connect the houses to their corresponding destinations, with cars traveling to "deliver" passengers. Successfully delivered passengers cause a "pin" at the destination to disappear, but failing to deliver in time leads to the destination becoming overwhelmed, resulting in game over. This loop continues as the city grows more complex, with new houses and destinations continuously appearing, forcing you to constantly optimize your road network.

❤ Resource Management and Upgrades

You have a limited number of road tiles to work with, which you must carefully allocate and rearrange as the city evolves. Deleting and rebuilding roads is a core part of the strategy, as you need to constantly optimize your network. At the end of each in-game "week", you're given a choice of two random upgrades to add to your toolkit, such as roundabouts, highways, bridges, tunnels, and additional road tiles. Carefully incorporating these upgrades into the growing city is critical to maintaining an efficient flow of traffic.

❤ Increasing Complexity and Challenge

As the game progresses, the pace quickens, and the city becomes more densely populated with houses and destinations. This leads to a rising challenge in connecting everything effectively and preventing traffic jams and destination overloads. Key factors that increase the difficulty include more houses and destinations spawning, destinations upgrading to more demanding "circular" versions, limited resources forcing difficult decisions, and obstacles like water and mountains making it harder to construct direct routes. You must adapt your strategies, constantly rerouting and rebuilding your road networks, to keep up with the escalating demands.

❤ Emergent Gameplay and Replayability

Each map presents a unique geographic layout with its own obstacles, forcing you to develop new strategies. The random spawning of houses and destinations also ensures no two playthroughs are exactly alike. The game's scoring system and leaderboards encourage experimentation and optimization, while the variety of maps, upgrades, and game modes (including daily/weekly challenges) result in a highly replayable experience.

❤ Accessibility and Presentation

Praised for its excellent accessibility features, including colorblind modes and customizable color palettes, the minimalist, stylized visual presentation is both aesthetically pleasing and functional. The responsive soundtrack and smooth, fluid animations complement the core gameplay loop, creating an engaging and soothing experience.

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