Dev it all

This is a swing away from my recent content. I wanted to talk a little about what I do when I’m not coding or researching. This is a portion of that.

I used to be an avid PC and console gamer.

Some of my favourite times from when I was much younger include the PS1 (and the wonderful Digimon games) and the PS2 with Final Fantasy X being my all-time super-uber favourite.

Over time I got into online games like League of Legends, played some MMOs; like Ragnarok Online, FlyFF and FFXIV and even some shooters; like CoD and Battlefield.

Nowadays, I’ll be honest, I can’t sit and play these things for any length of time. I get itchy to do stuff on my laptop with code. It’s great, but at the same time, it’s a bit of a curse. We recently got a PS5 and I’ve enjoyed the time I spent playing Tales of Arise massively. It’s breathtaking but it’s also very long and requires hours to put in.

One day I know I will go back to this hobby properly. When things are calmer, I’ve gotten older and done most of the career, house and travel-related things I want to do.

Until then…

I’ve been playing random little mobile games.

Now, I can’t sit and play a lot of the puzzlers and gem-battle-war games, whatever the majority is doing now. I really like the semi-in-depth games. This is why I’m writing this up and will likely cover more when I’ve played them more.

I think having something to switch off with is important, even if it’s only for 10-15 minutes at a time.

Mini Motorways is a very simple game at its premise. You control the flow of traffic within your selected city, determining if people get to their high priority jobs in these non-descript factories on time, or the world may just implode.

That’s how I like to frame it anyway.

You start off with a coloured house that is plopped onto the map and a matching coloured factory plopped on a different bit of the map. You have a set number of road tiles to join them up and get the workday rolling.

From there you also get superpower tiles. Like traffic lights, roundabouts, motorways, bridges and the likes to make everything more efficient. As long as you put them in the right place.

I would happily tap and swipe away joining everything up. Watching my little traveller count increase as more houses and factories are spawned and I make a… beautiful mesh of roads that look like a drawing for a chaotic brain.

As time goes on, it gets more intense though. You realised you done f-ed up the routes for orange because now you have a new factory across a river, with a need for workers. You have no bridges. No motorways. You realise there’s a pile-up on the west side because your roundabout needs to be one junction lower.

Chaos.

That’s the cool thing though. This game is completely chill, there’s not a lot to do. However, the moment you want to try and get those higher scores, it starts throwing stuff at you. You need to pause and re-jig all your roads to a more efficient plan and in the end, when the world does inevitably implode you still go back for more.

I know that’s the addictive nature of some of these games as well. But that whole rollercoaster of a mind melt happened in like 15 minutes.

The perfect amount of time for my brain to have switched off and reset before I look back at that annoying test that’s still failing, likely due to a stupid property on a response object in MSW that I’ve misnamed somewhere down the line.

To Conclude

These sorts of little games that have actual enrichment values are fantastic. They still challenge you but on a smaller scale while allowing you to rest the parts of your mind you need to.

I’m going to cover some more of these but for now, give Mini Motorways a try.

It’s on iOS and Steam.

Mini Metro is Dinosaur Polo Club’s original game with this theme and that’s available on Android if that’s your setup. Works similarly from what I can see so yeah!

Just, don’t spend all day playing. You have bugs to squash you know. Priorities people.