Lessons Learned Shipping Mini Motorways: A bumpy road to success
summary
Eighteen months from prototype to launch: 9 months prototyping then 9 months production. Iterations move from Freeways-like sketches to the final tile-based system with town halls, per-color car parks, eight-way roads and motorways; the fatal change is replacing unrecoverable traffic-jam loss with limited-car round trips. Production builds a Unity in-engine map designer using the Unity2D tilemap as data tiles for fast iteration. Apple Arcade forces mobile-first, tvOS Siri Remote and controller support, cloud save and initial no-analytics constraints, which created specific UI, QA and bug-hunting tradeoffs.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:55Overview A game story in three parts
- 4:31Freeways Replica 2
- 5:51Freeways - Expanding
- 7:29Voronoi Regions
- 12:16Big Roads Little Roads - Reveal
- 13:08Big Roads Little Roads - Paths
- 16:09Tileways Next
- 17:13Hexways
- 17:28Noderways
- 18:07Tileways Odyssey
- 19:03Tileways 76
- 20:58Let's Go! Tileways
- 22:51Tileways Artefact
- 24:09Super Smash Tileways Ultimate
- 25:43New Super Tileways Deluxe v2
- 30:05Map Designer
- 34:17Lessons Learned
- 37:42Apple Arcade Requirements
- 39:54Launch Issues: Game Balance How am I supposed to link the yellow office
- 40:45Launch Issues: Simulation Bugs
- 41:10Launch Issues: Soft Crashes
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