Hey check out this site, you can make your own subway map! Thanks to that virality the game sailed through Greenlight. The game was quick to play, relatively intuitive, and had a virality that the accessibility of the build played into. It was front-and-center on the index page, not hidden away behind a button. We designed the website around the web player. The first release of Mini Metro’s playable alpha was in September 2013. Lucas Pope had released betas of the game during development while it’s impossible to know how that impacted the eventual sales, it obviously didn’t preclude commercial success. The game we had in the back of our minds was Papers, Please. In the weeks afterwards, when we were discussing how to continue development, we reasoned that keeping it freely playable up to release, and possibly even after release, wouldn’t be such a bad idea. So almost from the game’s inception it was freely playable online. "It’s impossible to know for sure, but we don’t think Dinosaur Polo Club would be operating now if it wasn’t for that web-playable build." We chose to use Unity for our Ludum Dare entry because of the high uptake of the Unity Web Player-like most entrants, we wanted as many people to play our game as possible, and reasoned that a game playable in the browser would get more attention than a downloadable executable. As it is, Mini Metro has kept us busy for over three years! 2) Giving the game away Any concept we couldn’t have fully prototyped in two days would have been too much for us to fully develop. Prototyping in a game jam wasn’t something we consciously decided on, but in hindsight it gave us our most important constraint. While we discussed a number of ideas that fit within the constraints, we didn’t prototype anything until Ludum Dare 26 in April 2013. Themes that kept recurring in our concepts were procedural levels and abstract visual styles. Not only could we immediately discard 90% of our potential ideas without agonizing for days over the viability of each one, but the constraints themselves inspired ideas. One thing we immediately found is how ironically liberating it is operating within tight constraints. We outlined the following hard constraints that any concept would need to fit within:
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