‘When people get to their own conclusions, as opposed to us telling them explicitly, then it’s a lot more impactful,’ explains Tanoi. It simply asks you to look and listen to see what it is you are doing. Rather than the orchestrated pieces of games like Cities Skylines that impart a feeling of diligent, aspirational achievement and success through growth, the procedurally-generated ambient electronica of Mini Motorways allows for other perspectives never asking you to interpret the game one way or another. It’s the kind of experience that proffers its perspective in a more elegant and subtle way than simply having all your buildings spew black smoke, with a big ‘ROADS ARE BAD’ message pop-up halfway through the game. ‘There’s an element of the futility of sprawling uncontrolled growth because that’s another big aspect of the design of any Mini Motorways map stuff’s just going to spawn all over the place,’ says Lucas-Quaid. Read: Making video games for a dying planet It’s in that zoom – an ever-so-slight pulling back of a camera as you respond to a landscape capable of spawning department stores and office blocks ad infinitum – that an emotional truth emerges from Mini Motorways one that silently lets players come to understand the nature of the game they’re playing. On top of that, have that imperceptibly slow zoom.” ![]() ‘When you start in Motorways, you have a building and two houses, and because they don’t take up that much screen space it’s visually quite appealing to see it expand. ‘The complexity increases with the amount of screen retail you take up’ says Tana Tanoi, one of the programmers who worked on the game. It places the blinders of growth and progress on you, before tearing them off at the climax of a run, and calmly presenting you with the heaving, concrete monstrosity you crafted as you dealt with the ever-increasing complexity of the map. It’s almost insidious, the flow state that a game like Mini Motorways can put you in. ‘You look back, and you’re like “huh… how did I get here?” and you never actually noticed that much is happening while it’s happening.’ ![]() It always feels like a “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!” moment,’ laughs Casey Lucas-Quaid, community manager at Dinosaur Polo Club, as she quotes the Talking Heads track ‘ Once in a Lifetime’. ‘When you get to the end of a map, or even just a game over… zooms out and you can go into photo mode and you see what you’ve built you can see how complex it was. However, when it came to Mini Motorways, originally released on Apple Arcade in 2019 and now on Steam in 2021, Dinosaur Polo Club put a little more devil in the game’s details. ![]() ![]() Frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer autoplay clipboard-write encrypted-media gyroscope picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>ĭinosaur Polo Club, the developers of Mini Motorways, have had their heads firmly burrowed into this world of aesthetic city-building puzzlers since 2015’s Mini Metro, an exceedingly clean railway management game that captured the minds of players burned out on the obsession with micro-management in traditional city-building games.
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