![]() ![]() "The world's great metro systems weren't built that way. However, it's also an increasingly familiar problem in cities that have experienced explosive growth in the suburbs. circles without squares) is a big problem that will quickly overload your network, no matter what you do."Īccording to Walker, this poor land use is a worst-case scenario for transit planners, forcing them to either string together residential areas on a single line-and overload it-or build multiple lines into the same area, which gets expensive fast. "A large area that's all residential with few jobs (e.g. " Mini Metro imagines a city that is planned by someone else, or that grows haphazardly, where the transit system is totally reactive," Walker says. For example, so a hospital-bound passenger will appear at a residential stop at a reasonable time of day."īut far from merely deciphering the symbols, Walker pointed out that these randomly spawning stations follow little rhyme or reason-making the cities of Mini Metro a nightmare for a transit planner. "The only reason they ever correlated to specific destinations was to ease the creation of the passenger timetables. ![]() ![]() "He figured it all out," says Curry, adding that even though this was their original interpretation, the team now only refers to stations by shape. One expert even pointed out that the simple simulations of Mini Metro weren't far off from the software high-level experts use to analyze train patterns. Planners enjoyed seeing a video game portray their work, while the transit map community gloried in a system that let them sketch their own rail networks. "Having experts over what we'd made was understandably unsettling."īut while there were some corrections and feedback, the overall response was positive. "At first we were a bit nervous when it went through the transit planning community, because we'd done so little research," admits Curry. After sweeping through IndieCade, Steam Greenlight, and Early Access, Mini Metro released on Steam in November of 2015-and that's when the team began receiving long emails from public transit enthusiasts, designers, and academics. They formed a studio- Dinosaur Polo Club-and hired a small team to work at their home base in Wellington, New Zealand. The game was enough of a hit that the brothers decided to stick with the formula and upgrade the game to a full experience. "He'd found it surprisingly satisfying, so perhaps we could make a game with the tube map?" We have a chance to see why the Titans used the engine for a GPSC."That led Robert to think about planning trips on the London Underground," says Curry. Please keep on a watch on our future interview with Rob and Peter from the Dinosaur Polo Club. There you have it, the London Underground owes so much to Mini-Metro. In the past, its interesting to open up the minds of a developer who would create what would become a future hit, and uncover this information is just another reason we love GDC. The London Underground was the primary inspiration for the development of a Mini Metro, particularly when it comes to the similarities of the game minimalist graphics to the metro maps that line the city centre. From there, the brothers worked together to build their original minimalist games concepts, furthering the basis for the Metro, and then by the Autoway in the Minero neighborhood. It was just such an interesting puzzle that I hadn’t really done before. It was important to be here when I felt like okay and I must get here. I was in London and really enjoyed having to go by bus from A to B. It seems that London’s convoluted transport system is for something a good thing. As it turns out, if it weren’t for one visit to London, things could be different.īy speaking with the brothers responsible for the founding of Dinosaur Polo Club, Rob and Peter Curry, we learned that while the original project had already had a pitch, the trip to London was the first step of Rob’s plan. In one of these discussions, which had a chance to meet the Dinosaur Polo Club, we discovered something fascinating about the game creation. We were sitting on GDC 2023, with all the latest titles on display and talking to the developers. ![]()
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