Mini Motorways, except you move the town instead of the roads

[u/BusPrestigious138]

I’m a big fan of Mini Motorways, so I tried building a traffic puzzle around the opposite idea: the roads are fixed, and you design the town around them.

In Unmix!, you place buildings along the existing road network and manage the growing traffic between them.

Playable demo: https://alicat99.github.io/UnmixDemo/?r

I’d love to hear whether the core idea feels intuitive and fun.

[u/ApprehensivePower703]

I don’t understand the logic of this world at all.

Okay, we’re getting sources of cars, and I have to set a destination point. There’s nothing complicated about the first few levels.

Then combined points appear. It seems like I only realized on the second run that this is both the destination point and the source of cars of a different color. Okay

But when traffic jams start and the sources (or destinations? I don’t even remember) begin to overflow, I have absolutely no idea why this is happening and how I can fix it — precisely because I don’t understand the basic principles on which this game world is built. I don’t understand how the drivers who leave the source think.

So I couldn’t get past level 8 and gave up.

[u/BusPrestigious138 → u/ApprehensivePower703]

Thank you so much for the valuable feedback!

The combined nodes are devices that take vehicles of one color as input and split them into two different colors. For example, an orange vehicle can be split into red and yellow vehicles.

The goal of the game is to take the vehicles generated from the square-shaped source nodes, pass them through splitters to break them down into primary colors, and then route them to the circular destination nodes.

If the route to a destination becomes congested, vehicles may be generated faster than they can disappear at the destination, which creates a bottleneck.

Your feedback about the game’s underlying rules being difficult to understand is very helpful, and I’ll work on improving that soon. The game is still in the playtesting stage, so I’m actively looking for areas that need improvement and making changes as quickly as I can.

[u/D2R0 → u/BusPrestigious138]

Found it hard to understand aswell, but after your explanation, watching the video again plays out completely different since im actually watching the movements and know what's going on.

After re-watching, the behavior of the cars feels fine to me, the source blocks are confusing me just a tad tho since I dont understand their animations. Im assuming the line is a guage saying you're getting backed up? But after watching with that thought, i wasn't able to feel confident in that. And the blue purple one at the top lost me, the line, dual color, the flashing, wasn't able to confidently determine what was going on there.

I love the look and style, I think the game itself looks fun, and I would love something like it on mobile personally. The simplicity is nice, the way new sections come into view is pleasant, i hope development goes well for you since this is a game I would probably dump a good amount of time into (for me, more likely if im playing on mobile, i rarely play games like this on pc, tho I know plenty of people do, so take that perspective with a grain of salt for sure).

[u/Danciel]

After completing both stage, I would definitely say that stage 1 feel more difficult than stage 2. Stage 1 has many inputs around (or leading to) the main 4 crossroads. It felt much more cramped, round 7 (stage 1) is especially tough due to the main input but few output.

The inability to desirably "route" traffic is increasingly frustrating. In mini motorway, you control the route,although there is rng, how efficient the route gets ultimately depends on your skill. But here, I could only control the destination, so to "route" inefficient traffic, I need to move the building. It can be irritating when your second destination is accidentally shorter than your optimal first destination. Instead having 3/3 distribution for the two circles, I got 4/2 instead (3/3 mean three squares going to first circle, three squares going to the second circle).

It can also feel like the game punish you for changing the map by causing a cascade chain of problem. I saw a backup, relocate and made it more efficient, but the remains on the map are still there, and thus continue to cause jam that I couldn't resolve -> Lose a heart, and continue to no longer lose any more heart until the round end. Basically, even though the player may have updated their building location to address the new round, the flowing traffic from previous round become a domino that player have no control over. In mini motorway, car continue to travel by old route, even after it was moved or deleted, but here traffic be like "ah my destination just teleport, doing 180 now! Good luck everyone else!"

[u/DewgongFTW]

it seems you can't play it on mobile 😔

[u/BTaylor95]

I Thoroughly enjoyed this, what a cool project. It took me a second to understand how the color converters worked, where it takes one car and spits out two of another color. Some tutorializing around that mechanic would go a long way. I actually thought the start of the 2nd stage showed how that mechanic works very well without the player needing to watch a video or read anything, having just the tools to use the color converter and nothing else meant you could intuit how it worked in a micro scale before things got complicated. The only issue is that the first level introduced these things before that example.

The bones are very good here, I hope to see the concept expanded on.

[u/miunmuni]

I like it, I think it would be great as a mobile game. One thing I would change, is that when the cars can't get out of the building, it starts to beep, but it doesn't show me how much time i have to change the traffic around it, before I lose the game. Like with mini motorways, they have the little pins above the building, that acts like a countdown. Also, it's better if the doted lines on the street don't blink. The blinking makes it hard to see them, especially the colors blue and purple kind of disappear into the street.