Mini Motorways, the popular traffic management sim, has become a favourite among players and urban planning enthusiasts alike. Known for its strategic depth and minimalist design aesthetic, the Mini series from Dinosaur Polo Club continues to innovate upon that formula. The latest ‘Down Under’ update sees Mini Motorways debut a new Australian map and a mode being added to the game.
The Down Under Update introduces players to the Cairns, Australia map. As players zoom out from the bustling roads, they’re met with a striking view of the Great Barrier Reef, with the map centring on the coast This clever addition not only grounds the map in its real-world location but also subtly highlights the environmental impact of pollution. It’s a timely reminder of the real-world environmental challenges we’re facing.
Cairns joins a roster of 22 maps in Mini Motorways, proving just how dedicated Dinosaur Polo Club is to curating an engaging array of new locations to visit. Whether you’re dealing with each map’s natural geography or adjusting to the population density in urban areas – each map feels like a new puzzle to solve.
The update also welcomes the new Cinematic mode! Players can actually follow a commuter as they travel around their own maps. It’s quite a relaxing addition to the game, perfect for those looking to see their motorways from another perspective. What I find most exciting about the cinematic mode is that you don’t even need to make a perfectly functioning map to enjoy it. Usually, it’s only a matter of time before the perfect system in the game is buckling under more and more drivers, yet watching one little driver struggling through overloaded intersections or bottlenecks feels like a unique joy.
Interview with Dinosaur Polo Club
With the release of the Down Under update, we had the opportunity to talk all things Mini Motorways with Dinosaur Polo Club’s Community Manager and Engagement Lead – Casey Lucas-Quaid!
How has the experience of working on Mini Motorways differed from Mini Metro?
Casey: In my role there aren’t a tonne of day-to-day differences, but for the studio at large: for starters, our team was larger! Mini Metro came to life with just one designer, one programmer, one artist, and one sound engineer. By the time Mini Motorways was in prototyping, that team size had doubled. It’s a more complex game in terms of the simulation and by virtue of representing an actual simulated highway system instead of just a tube map, the art is more complex as well.
Working on the community side of things, they’re pretty similar! Both games’ communities are made up of passionate urbanists and transit nerds, so I fit right in, thank god. As someone who’s been around since Mini Motorways’ beginning, the biggest difference for me is that I just didn’t expect it to get so massive! The immediate popularity after our Steam launch blew away even my most rose-tinted expectations, for which I’m forever grateful. It’s a wonderful problem to have as an indie developer, and we are keenly aware of how lucky we are. We work hard, but there’s no kidding ourselves in terms of survivor bias – plenty of people work just as hard without having had the good fortune we’ve had, so working on Mini Motorways comes with this expectation that I ought not squander that.
Traffic management seems like an unusual topic for a game – why do you think it’s so satisfying?
Casey: For starters, it’s solving a real-world problem that a lot of people encounter every day. Everyone has been stuck in traffic or stuck at a busy public transit hub, frustrated by schedules seeming nonsensical or, for the more civically-minded, transit funding being appropriated in silly ways. By giving players a problem from real life and saying “now go forth and do it better,” you’re offering them some fun stress relief. Plus there’s something about seeing a lot of little coloured agents moving around on the screen – freeing them up to move as best they can and achieving that flow state is satisfying no matter what game you can make it happen in.
What research goes into making a map based on a real location?
Casey: All sorts! We have a process for selecting maps and it touches on everything from player suggestions to ensuring diverse geography is represented for gameplay reasons to ensuring diverse geography is represented because we don’t want the game to feel ‘European’ or ‘North American’ or any other particular way. The art team does a lot of work on selecting coastlines, hills, and landmasses that will be visually interesting while the design team interprets whether those same things would make for interesting challenges. It’s a wonderfully collaborative process. Then, once we’ve got a candidate in mind and work is under way, we make sure to do a cultural consultation to make sure that we’re representing the location properly and the names of things like rivers are translated accurately.
Cairns is a very picturesque part of Australia. What makes it a perfect location for the next Mini Motorways map?
Casey: Haha, I feel like I already answered a lot of that above because it fit all of those criteria! But speaking to Cairns more specifically: it’s such a beautiful part of the country. Plus it’s something a little different. We have had a lot of requests from our community for an Australian map, but we wanted to give players something a little unexpected. For a highway-related game, it would be so easy to just choose the cities in any given country with the biggest or most roads, but what’s the fun in that?
The Great Barrier Reef appears on the Cairns map. Do you see natural landmarks as an extra challenge for players to work around, or are they more about making the maps feel alive and authentic?
Casey: Both! To use our hometown map of Wellington as an example, the hills on the Wellington map in Mini Motorways are an accurate representation of the city’s geography, wtihin reason. A lot of players have told me they can’t stand this map because it’s difficult to work through and around those hills, but it’s also a representation of Wellington’s “Town Belt,” a ring of undeveloped green hills and parks that encircle the harbour and city. The Town Belt feels alive and authentic and sets Wellington apart as a real-life location, so seeing it represented in a game in that way is great, even though players find it infuriating. Git gud I guess? (I kid, I suck at this map too.)
The Great Barrier Reef is such an important part of Cairns as a location as well as its significance to Australia overall. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have seen the reef as a site of great importance and a place to be protected for millennia. And while it’s tough to work much in terms of overt political messaging into a minimalist traffic game, it’s there if you squint: in Mini Motorways, you always lose when cars are the only way you attempt to solve a city’s problems. The Great Barrier Reef is this breathtaking living thing and it is under threat from corporate and government actors who treat the natural world with contempt and everyone on our team balked at the idea of excluding it from the map. Some of us felt like doing so would be sort of rubber-stamping the idea of its erasure. Aidan, our artist on the project, took this representation and ran with it in such an excellent way.
The new cinematic mode is a fresh point of view for players’ creations in Mini Motorways. How do you see players using this mode?
Casey: Any way they want! We’ve had a lot of feedback come through over the years that sometimes people play the game to just chill and zone out, and our technical designer Tana Tanoi had this brilliant idea to just…give them that! You can enable it and just follow one of your little cars around the map to the ambient soundtrack. We’re looking at fleshing out this mode further to provide an actual ambient lo-fi chillout experience. Disasterpeace has done such a great job with the soundtrack, I’m not surprised it’s one of the parts of the game people love most.
Play Mini Motorways
Mini Motorways, including the free Down Under content update, is out now on Apple Arcade, Steam and Nintendo Switch.
