Tag: Mini Metro

Some thoughts on the design of Mini Metro

I picked up Mini Metro about a week ago. I know it’s been around a few years, but I never claimed to be trendy.

I like the aesthetic and the mechanics of the game. It’s relaxing to play, yet gets hectic and overwhelming. It’s a fairly unique concept for a game, so it gets innovation and originality points. It’s a math-y game, but it presents the math intuitively and concretely, using shape and color and quantities that you have to eyeball, rather than representing quantities with numbers. There are various rates at which things happen, things that place demand on your resources, and you have to come up with a system that effectively utilizes those resources and balances demand. It requires a bit of strategy and some cleverness, and you can pause it, take your time, and think, or count and measure, or whatever you need to do to figure out your strategy. You have to understand how the rules work, and there is complexity in the ways the rules combine, but the rules are relatively simple taken individually, and they are introduced one at a time in a way that makes them easy to learn.

I don’t think it’s perfect, but it’s a pretty good game concept. Obviously, it’s been successful and popular.

But I think about ways I might improve its design.

What I don’t like about it is that there’s a little too much randomness in the spawning of the station points. Depending on how those play out, you can get totally screwed and have no possible way of managing the problems the game presents you. I feel like a better game design would always ensure that there was a solution that a sufficiently talented player could come up with, but that seeing the solution and implementing it would be the things that are difficult. It’s fine for the game to present a difficult challenge, and more difficult as the game progresses, but they shouldn’t be impossible.

So, for example, spawning a cluster of 6-10 Circle stations with no other types of stations in the region is an unfair situation. The spawning code should either not do this, or there should be ways to consolidate/erase multiple stations into a super-station. The game does give you Interchange stations, which have more capacity and speed than a basic station, but it only upgrades one existing station, and can’t be used to consolidate several nearby stations of the same type into one. I think it would be way more interesting if you could upgrade one station, and then all basic stations of the same shape within a certain radius of the new interchange would de-spawn, consolidating their traffic into the Interchange.
But I think the way I’d prefer to solve the problem would be to put the Station spawning in the player’s hands, not have it be done automatically by the game.

So my proposal would be that **passengers** would appear throughout the city, with a destination in mind (indicated by their shape). They have a limited walking distance that they are capable of traveling before they get tired and irritated. Irritated pedestrians change color and vibrate to indicate they are tired and unhappy. They will walk toward the nearest station, and try to travel to the closest station that matches their shape.

To make them happy, you can build a station near enough to them that they will walk to it, and then you can connect stations with your rail systems to take them efficiently to their destinations. You can spawn an unlimited number of stations (hmmm, perhaps), but you have limited resources in terms of rail lines, cars, carriages, bridges, and tunnels to connect them.

The passenger spawning is out of the player’s control, that part is provided by the game as the challenge, and the player can strategically build stations of the type desired, at the point desired. Maybe the player should be constrained by having to choose how many of which shape station is available to them, or something like that.

The other thing that I see with the game is that, at some point the game just decides to flood you with passengers until you die. Usually somewhere around the 1200-2000 passenger mark, the game just cranks up the generation of more passengers, attempting to overwhelm the player and force the game to a conclusion. Again, I think it’s better to give the player challenges that are possible. Maybe it gets harder and harder to keep up with the challenge, but there should always be a way to do it.

(I accept that it could be there is, and that it only seems like the game becomes impossible because I’m locked in to the design choices I made, and if I tore everything down and re-designed, maybe there’d be a way to create a more efficient system with the same resources available to me that could handle the new volume of traffic. But it doesn’t seem that way to me — even on Endless and Creative modes, where I have no constraints on the resources available to me to build the system, no matter how many lines and cars I throw at the problem, the population will always scale to a point where there’s always overcrowded stations.)

One thing I like about the game is that they don’t have an in-game currency that you earn by transporting passengers and use to spend on improvements for your transit system. I think if the game had that, it would be too much like a Sim-style game, and I think removing a concept of money, and de-coupling a potential feedback loop of performance income improvement more performance helps to keep the game simple — and I like that.

I wonder about that, and why the designer of the game decided on that. Because it’s inconceivable that they wouldn’t have considered every completed trip being converted into in-game money that would be spendable on more rail lines, trams, carriages, etc.

And they must have considered that, and then discarded the idea. I wonder why they decided it and what pros/cons they weighed to make that decision.