First things first, ‘Mini’ will always be our jam. We have loved working on Mini Metro and Mini Motorways over the years, and we’ve been thrilled to work on the next installment in the Mini series while we’ve continued supporting our existing titles. In fact, we just gave the green light to our next Mini, but more on this later! While we continued to expand our Mini-world, we wanted to provide our team an opportunity to explore something entirely new in parallel to ‘Mini’ development, which is how we arrived at Magic School. This new project was an opportunity for our artists to step out of the minimalist beauty that is iconic ‘Mini’ and get out their oil paints, canvas, and cloth to concept stunning characters, unique magically-minded tools, and castles set in impressionistic meadows and snow-capped cliffsides. It allowed our programmers and designers breadth and time to discover and iterate on entirely new ways of creating management simulation games with unique character interactions and exciting resources, with the intention of giving our existing Mini community a chance to see what ‘Mini’ could look like in a totally different universe, through the lens of our dino eyes but still wholly different. 

While we most certainly achieved so much during our prototyping of Magic School, we ultimately arrived at the conclusion that, while the game showed much promise, it was not for us to make. In order to showcase the features we’d crafted and the ideas our team had produced, the scope would need to be greater than we’d anticipated, and our resources as a small indie studio were limited while we tried to support two existing titles while developing a third title in that franchise alongside the development of an entirely new monolithic game. 

We’re sad to say goodbye to Magic School, but we’re incredibly grateful for all that it’s taught our small studio. We know that amongst a never-ending cycle of industry layoffs, it’s rare to see a studio cancel a project and not let any of their team go. This is one of our pillars as a studio: support our dinos and support our industry, ensuring that we retain our incredible talent. While none of our dinos will be leaving due to this project being canceled, we’ll be waving bittersweet goodbye to Magic School, and we encourage you all to check out some of the amazing art that was created from this project. 

If you’d like to read any more about this project, what our developers think about it, or see more art, check out the resources below! 

Looking to the future, we’re so excited to fully direct our efforts towards the next installment in the ‘Mini’ series, and we can’t wait to share what our team has been working on. We are endlessly grateful for the support from our community over the years, which has allowed us to explore new projects while continuing development on our existing titles. Stay tuned for exciting announcements about what’s to come, and we hope you enjoy going on a visual journey through our work on Magic School!

• Coverage by The Verge 
• ArtStation 
• YouTube

The post Why We Didn’t Give the Green Light to Our New Project appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

In addition, kicking off this week, we’re bringing you a month of fun and games as part of Apple Arcade’s Play Together event! Starting 6th June, join us for four weeks of videos from your favourite content creators, tailored Daily and Weekly Challenges, and a chance to Play Together with some cosy community spirit. 

We are beyond grateful to have such a diverse player base from every beautiful corner of the globe! Let’s Play Together and celebrate some of our most beloved Daily and Weekly Challenges. The schedule will be as follows: 

• Week 1 will feature our new map, Vancouver, Canada!

• Week 2 heads south to Chiang Mai, Thailand!

• Week 3 takes us to Mexico City!

• Week 4 our journey winds down in Mumbai, India!

Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for highlights, giveaways, and more over the next month! We’ll be sharing details on who our streamers are and where to find them on our socials soon. Check out some of the videos our content creators have made so far:

Enjoy hunting for some fresh achievements on our new Vancouver map – we can’t wait to see you on the leaderboards!

The post Let’s ‘Play Together’! Check out our latest map: Vancouver, Canada! appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

• A brand new map! Traverse the narrow peninsulas and rugged coves of our new map, Reykjavík.
• New Achievements, Daily Challenges, Weekly Challenges, and City Challenges.
• Changes to how our 10-year Miniversary badge operates. You can now click the badge to see what’s new in our latest update.
• You can now access the Options menu while paused.
• Additional checks for iCloud functionality to ensure save progress is synced.
• Various minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

As we conclude an amazing year for the Mini Collection, we want to take a moment to thank our players for celebrating our 10-year ‘Miniversary’ with us in July. In case you missed it, we dropped our biggest update to Mini Metro & Mini Motorways so far, complete with 6 beloved maps and a suite of crossover features! Read more about The Miniversary Update here.

The post Mini Motorways Goes to Iceland in the Aurora Borealis Update! appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

As with most art, Mini Motorways’ recognizable style started out with an idea (or a few!) that evolved and evolved until it arrived where it needed to. Most artists will tell you that it’s not until you look back at where you started that you can see the clear path to where you arrived. That path is where the mystery lives for so many; that elusive process from start to finish is hidden within the walls of the dev team, and all you see when a game is released is that shiny finished product!

So, we thought, why not lift the veil a bit? Come with us as we take a stroll through Mini Motorways’ early concept art and trace the visual evolution of our second Mini game. 

This screenshot of Mexico City shows one of the later iterations of Mini Motorways’ art style, and if you’re a consistent player, you might spot the differences! First, we see diagonal spawning – a feature that doesn’t exist in the current version of Mini Motorways. Secondly, the roads have a dashed line, a small detail we can’t help but notice! Can you spot anything else?

If we time travel a bit further back, we can examine this earlier version of the same city, only this version displays a different take on parking lots.

When we were ideating on how to portray mountains in our maps, this concept art was created before we arrived at the current depiction. 

Now to go somewhere entirely different, this adorable and visually pleasing isometric Mini Motorways style was created with none other than the highly-requested overpass feature! You can see so much of the current Motorways art in this concept piece. 

Lastly, for no reason other than just a bit of cheeky fun, our Art Director took this concept art and turned it into some stunning monotone pixel art. 

We have boundless admiration for our amazing art team and their varied talents. The visual journey of Mini Motorways is something we’re so excited to share with you all, so make sure to check out its latest evolution in The Miniversary Update as we introduce colourful new maps and exciting new features!

The post Behind the Scenes: Concepting Mini Motorways appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

Last week we shared part one of two posts featuring ‘A Chat with the Devs.’ This week, we’re chatting with one of the original Mini Motorways artists, plus one of our co-founders!

First, we took a stroll over to our amazing art team and asked one of our original dinos, Poppy, what difference the Mini Series has made to their career. Has ‘Mini’ taught you anything you didn’t expect it to?

I think the biggest difference Mini games have made to my career is giving me the opportunity to experience making a game that is so different from the traditional game pipelines. This has helped me open my eyes to other ways of approaching creating games that I would not have thought of otherwise!

It’s also taught me that there is a ridiculous amount of work that goes into minimalist games. When I first started working at Dinosaur Polo Club, I imagined [the Mini games] would be simpler to make due to fewer art assets being needed. WRONG!! They’re just as complicated, and the amount of careful design that goes into each art asset is mind-boggling sometimes.

As we reflect on our very first game, Mini Metro, we couldn’t help but ask our co-founder and designer, Robert, the following question. The ‘Mini Series’ seems like it was the thing that cemented your role as more of a game designer than a programmer, although you have a history in the later. What was it about design that pulled you in that direction? 

I’d always been interested in branching out into design, and in my early days at Sidhe Interactive I got to design a few small features on our sports titles. Peter, Jamie [Churchman, Mini Metro’s original artist and contributor to the title’s updates to this day] and I all had a lot of input into the design of Mini Metro but I took the lead on map creation which meant I got a bit more cred as the ‘designer.’ I continue to program, and I enjoy the satisfaction of a well-thought-out solution to a tricky problem, but I’ve always seen it as more of a means to an end – and so pairing it with game design means you get to enjoy creating the problem and also solving it.

Lastly, we asked Robert what has surprised or delighted him most about seeing people interact with our games. Here’s what he said:

I think it’s always people responding unexpectedly, that’s always interesting. Early on in the beta we changed the map screen so it looked more like an old-fashioned NYC route map, however, it replaced the map preview with big coloured dots. What we found out was that people loved the maps, so we reverted the change. And the first version of the Hong Kong map had a bug that caused passengers to spawn at a much higher rate. It was an easy fix but people said they really liked it the way it was! So we went back and changed the map to give out double trains instead. It’s great when creation becomes a conversation with the community.

The post A Chat with the Devs, Part Two appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

While we sit in excited anticipation of The Miniversary Update (coming to you on July 24th PT), we struck up a chat with a few dinos from our team to talk all things ‘Mini’! 

First up, we asked Tom, one of our Game Designers, which map was his favourite to work on and why! Here’s what he said:

My favourite map to work on is either Chiang Mai due to its moat and unique double destination on the first spawn or New York City with the addition of Central Park, our first non-buildable area. Both of these maps provided a unique challenge yet were still super fun to balance. I do have a soft spot for Manila though, since that was the first map I worked on!

Next, we asked Dylan, Tom’s partner-in-crime and fellow Designer, if he could make any ‘Mini’ game with no limitations, what would it be? Here was his answer:

I’d love to do something in space! You could chart star systems and help humanity expand through the final frontier, establishing human colonies on new planets while also trying not to overpopulate or ruin the planets you inhabit. Fun sci-fi space stuff with some sort of message about looking after the natural resources of our planet (or planets, in this case).

I’d also love to do Mini Jurassic Park!

Finally, we ventured into a unique space at Dinosaur Polo Club, where our only Programmer-turned-Techincal-Designer, Tana, lives! We asked him what feature he would love to implement into Mini Motorways, regardless of how hard it would be to implement. Here’s what he said:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how cool it would be to implement an Endless Mode cinematic camera. The idea is that it would follow just one car around at a time for maybe a few minutes before jumping to another car. If we had that, we could record a 1-hour loop of Mini Motorways with some classic car & train ambiance for our players to check out and vibe to on YouTube.

Tune into the next post to hear from one of our original artists as well as our beloved co-founders!

The post A Chat with the Devs, Part One appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

If you’re well versed in the lore of Dinosaur Polo Club, you probably know that Mini Metro used to be called Mind the Gap back in 2013 when it was in its earliest iteration. The game was inspired by a thought that’s probably crossed the minds of anyone and everyone who has ever stepped foot on public transit: If I could change this metro network, I would. 

Of course, if you talk to any city planner, they’d probably rebut with something along the lines of, Go on and try, it’s not as easy as you might think! And any Mini Metro enthusiast would tell you that’s true. Mini games are often characterised by their trajectory from ‘zen to chaos,’ with procedurally generated audio that sucks you in with its melodic chimes before ramping up to match that higher-than-it-should-be heart rate of the player. 

Four years and many new maps after Mini Metro’s release, our studio was expanding from a small group of friends to five official ‘dinos,’ evolving the concepts from Mini Metro into something entirely new. Our small studio began working on what would later be called Mini Motorways, set to release in 2019 on a brand new platform: Apple Arcade. The game evolved over the course of several months (more on that later) and found inspiration in the likes of Justin Smith’s Freeways, real-world maps, and of course, Mini Metro. Our art style evolved (again, more on that later!), our design expanded, and our team grew and grew!

Several iterations, lots of late nights, nine platforms, over thirty maps, one BAFTA nomination, and millions of commuters later, Mini Metro is celebrating its 10th birthday! Mini Metro celebrates this massive milestone with its sibling, Mini Motorways, our dedicated community, and a team of thirty ‘dinos’ who create what we like to call ‘A World of Mini.’

We often talk about what makes a Mini game ‘Mini’,  making use of the delightful word ‘wuselfaktor,’ a German term used to refer to simulation games that have many small moving parts, or an ‘ant farm’ like quality. It’s how we think about that strangely satisfying feeling which can be so hard to put a finger on. Mini games are also defined by their simplicity, their approachability, and their relation to everyday concepts which, up until now, have dealt with travel. As we expand further into the Mini series, we realise that Mini can be anything, and anything can be Mini, which opens up a world of possibilities for what comes next.

When we stop to look at the last 10 years, we can’t help but look forward at the same time. One thing is for certain, whatever comes next in the Mini collection, we’re so grateful to have the opportunity to create games for our players. We hope you enjoy reflecting on all things Mini with us, and stay tuned for more insights into Dinosaur Polo Club!

The post From Mind the Gap to a World of Mini appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

All proceeds for this limited-release merch pack will be donated to Rainbow Youth, an organisation that provides education, information, support, and advocacy for LGBTIQ youth, and Mermaids UK, a charity that has supported gender-diverse children and their families since 1995. We believe in the power of community efforts, and that’s where you come in! 

We’re releasing 100 limited-edition merch packs, which will include:

• Custom Nintendo Switch skin featuring a never-before-seen Mini Motorways design from one of our original artists
• Mini Motorways stickers
• Mini Motorways mouse pad
• Mini Metro & Mini Motorways pins
• A special postcard from us, the dev team! 

To purchase this merchandise and help raise funds for our rainbow commuters,  place your order while supplies last!

An important note! Merch will be made-to-order once the sale closes on June 29th. Since we’re based in New Zealand, goodies will have to arrive in our home base before they can be bundled up and sent to your homes around the world. The variance in international shipping means we can’t guarantee a delivery date! 

The post Fundraise for Pride with a Mini Merch Pack! appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

The post Nominate Mini Motorways for The Steam Awards – Labour of Love! appeared first on Dinosaur Polo Club.

Endless Mode will now be available for every city you have unlocked. If you’ve ever wondered what could have been, you can now continue playing after Game Over to see if your alternate strategy might have saved the day. Play at your own speed, designing a bespoke city to ambient audio by Disasterpeace with no time limit and no pressure.

For those of you who want to challenge yourselves, Expert Mode has fresh obstacles and a new set of limitations. Roads and upgrades will become permanent as time passes, meaning every move counts! Before you can compete against the highest tier of civil engineers, you’ll need to reach a certain score on any of the maps’ challenges in order to unlock Expert Mode. After that, you can test your skills against the best of the best on a separate set of leaderboards.

Additionally, we’ve taken community feedback into consideration and added a suite of new zoom options to help you better plan your cities. Plus we’ve added a button to the weekly upgrade screen that will allow you to view your city while making your weekly selection. We hope these tweaks to the game’s interface help you enjoy Mini Motorways even more!

This update has been a long time in the making, from the early stages of player suggestions and our team exploring what might come out of experimenting with Mini Metro’s many game modes. We’re proud of how it’s turned out, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

The post Play Mini Motorways Your Way With Our New Endless & Expert Mode Update! appeared first on fbxidetey.xyz.