Peter and Robert Curry are a sibling duo of game creators who once worked for Sidhe Interactive, New Zealand's largest game developer, but quit in 2006. Seven years later, the brothers founded Dinosaur Polo Club, and in 2015, released their first piece of software: public transport strategy game Mini Metro. Recently, Peter Curry was kind enough to talk to me about his and Robert's journey developing the minimalist puzzler.
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Gamer_152:Prior to developing Mini Metro you and Robert had put together a number of game prototypes that didn't get released. Can you tell us what those prototypes consisted of?
Peter Curry: We talked about a lot of games, I can't remember how many we actually prototyped though. We first starting cobbling together games when we were teenagers in the 90s, so I won't go back that far! Just prior to Mini Metro I put together Quantum Run for another game jam. The idea was Super Hexagon meets Spaceteam. The player's screen was split vertically, with a spaceship on each half moving towards the top. The ships would mirror each other, so if one moved left, the other moved right. If one fired, the other one would shield. You'd need to check both halves of the screen to see how to position the ships, and which one needed to shoot or shield, in order to avoid asteroids and other obstacles. Before that we'd talked a lot about a turn-based historical strategy game set in a specific period (rather than "all of Civilization").
Years and years before that, from 2006 - 2008, we had our first go at indie gamedev when we formed Wandering Monster Studios with a third programmer, Lloyd Weehuizen. The game we were working on was Space: 1969, a collaborative online persistent space exploration / builder game. It was of course far too ambitious for three young devs so I wouldn't say we even had a prototype by the time we called it quits. We did release No One Can Stop The Farm Pioneer for one of the TIGSource competitions though. It was basically a farming game but with some space stuff in there because apparently we really like space. We worked with Jamie Churchman on Farm Pioneer.
G_152: One lesson you and Robert took from that prototyping was that you needed to reduce the scope of your projects. Were there any other lessons you took from that period or your earlier work at Sidhe into the Mini Metro development?
PC: To be honest I don't think I learned scope while at Sidhe Interactive. I was too young and too invincible to learn any hard lessons like that. I think it was going through the experience at Wandering Monster Studios and learning just how short a year is, and then becoming a dad years later and learning just how short a day is. When Robert and I were talking about potential games we could make, I was a stay-at-home dad with a nearly 1-year-old, and he'd been a full-time web developer for a few years. Neither of us had written a game in a long time. We were getting excited about the strategy game I mentioned earlier, but then it hit us that we have at most 3 hours a day each to work on anything. We realised if we wanted to actually get something to a point where we could ship it, we had to drastically rethink our options. From then on we were ruthless with our ideas.
What I did learn at Sidhe was simply how to make games. I spent my first four-and-a-half years there after I graduated from university with a computer science degree. I'd done some tinkering at home but had never finished a game. I really had no idea what I was doing, and was stunned when they extended my contract past the initial three months. I learned about working in teams, working with other disciplines, what "done" means, and all the other parts of game development you don't realise exist until you're part of it.
G_152: You mentioned to me that Mini Metro felt more like a game you discovered rather than one you designed. What did you mean by that?
PC: The concept for Mini Metro didn't come from us wanting to explore the intricacies of graph theory, or the connection people have to their subway network, or turn modern graphic design interactive. Instead it sprung from us deciding that if we wanted to finish a game, it had to have a minimalist art style. We quickly settled on the London Underground map and spent a couple of hours coming up with the simplest way to make a game out of it. We spent a weekend putting it together, and it just worked. I've never been involved in another project where the design flowed so naturally. We had great feedback on it immediately from the Ludum Dare community at the end of the game jam. All our friends were playing it, and well past the point of just being polite — they were actually coming back to it, playing for hours, and trying to top the high scores.
G_152: Not being artists or audio engineers yourselves, you brought on Jamie Churchman to work on Mini Metro's art and Rich Vreeland (Disasterpiece) to create the sound. Was there ever any trepidation in handing these integral parts of the game over to people from outside the initial project?
PC: Not at all. Robert and I met Jamie when we worked at Sidhe, and had a real respect for his work. We worked very closely together on the project. He contributed to all facets of the game, not just the art. In a game as minimalist as Mini Metro you can't silo off any of the disciplines anyway — graphic design is game design. It's funny looking over the early builds where we still thought we'd do all the art ourselves, before Jamie was involved. Not sure what we were thinking!
It was pretty cool working with Rich. He was our #1 pick for the audio and we were amazed when he actually agreed to take it on, and work with a couple of total unknowns. Thinking back it was a little scary when we listened to the first concept mix. We had developed the game for so long without any audio (and even released it on Early Access!) and were hoping that he was feeling the same hectic-zen vibe we felt Mini Metro had. Of course it fit our idea of the game perfectly and the final audio exceeded our expectations. It was a real interdisciplinary exercise, and a treat to work with him on it. We gave a talk at Konsoll in 2016 where Rich discusses some of [the] nuance he built into the system.
G_152:Jamie Churchman mentioned during one talk that there [was] a point where the game got too minimalist and some of the early access players rebelled. Can you explain what happened there?
PC: There were a couple of instances during development where we came unstuck a little. The first was during the open alpha when the game was freely available with the London map. During that time we were still trying to figure out the design of the weekly upgrades and experimenting a lot, so the design could vary a lot from week-to-week. The game had a decent number of dedicated players who would get in touch whenever the design veered in a direction they didn't like. We were unused to taking feedback, didn't know how to interpret it, so fell to grognard capture. The players giving us advice were of course the most invested, experienced players, who were unconsciously encouraging us to build more complexity into the game, which was driving it away from its minimalist, casual roots. Thankfully we realised what was happening after I think alpha9 — from memory we had some three-stage abomination of an upgrade selection process.
Thankfully the design was mostly wrapped up by the time we entered Early Access, so we didn't change the game much once people started paying for it. The one time that I can remember we made a "bad" change was relatively minor, but pertinent. Jamie was coming up with a more minimalist concept for the map selection screen, where the city maps were replaced by a matrix of five to seven dots, each coloured to match one of the city's lines (inspired by the classic New York Subway Guide cover). We thought it was beautiful, matched the minimalist aesthetic better than the busy map previews, and (I think this tipped it) made the code a lot simpler. Players hated it. We held our ground for about a day before realising we'd misstepped, and reverted back to the previews.
Feedback's a tricky thing, especially for an inexperienced designer. You have to have a solid idea of what your game is or it'll be pulled ten ways at once and not end up meaning anything to anyone. But you've also got to keep an open mind and realise when you were wrong about something.
G_152: You've also written before that there was a period during development where you had trouble balancing the game. What did that entail?
PC: Balancing the weekly upgrades took a lot of thought and a bunch of iterations throughout the alpha. It was the only major design element that was introduced from the prototype. We tried all sorts of things — different kinds of locomotives, limiting to one train per line, infinite slow bridges vs. finite fast bridges, carriages, changing station types, and others I've forgotten. The constants were no currency, no limit on line length, and no limit on editing. Those constraints made balancing the upgrades tricky for us as amateur designers. Most of the ideas we came up with were discarded before they even got to code. The breakthrough for us was removing the locomotive from the standard pool of options and simply giving one to the player each week. It is such an essential part of the network that the player was forced to select it when it was offered, so we were depriving them of any choice.
It's one of those decisions that seems obvious in hindsight. At the time we were still feeling out the design and learning what we could do with it. Actually that relates back to the point about feeling like Mini Metro was discovered, not designed. We'd stumbled upon this core of a game design, and had to poke and prod and experiment to gain some understanding of how it worked under the hood.
G_152: Having completed Mini Metro and seen considerable success with it, do you feel more confident in going broader in scope with your future projects?
PC: Yes, and I'm excited about it! Minimalist games have so few elements to them that if they're not all working in harmony, the game doesn't feel right. The design has so few levers to pull, and sometimes you could really do with a lever that just isn't there. I'm looking forward to working with some talented people on some neat projects that have a few more levers to play with. :)
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Thanks to Peter Curry and thank you for reading.
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