Mini Mobile Network Operator

About the game

Mini Mobile Network Operator puts you in charge of a phone network in a town that will not stop growing. New houses appear every few seconds, and every one of them brings customers who expect a signal. Your tools are cell towers, and you never have enough of them.

The map is a clean, almost diagrammatic grey plane, with roads that connect the houses as the town expands. Each customer is shown as a small coloured circle: green is a happy customer, yellow one who is getting annoyed and red one who is fed up. Customers walk between home and work and now and then ask for a signal; every request that no tower answers in time makes them less happy, and every answered one wins them back. You lose when too many customers (five, shown in the counter at the top left) are red at the same time, and your final score is the size of the town you managed to keep connected.

You build with cards. "Build on House" puts a tower on a roof, "Build on Ground" puts one on open land, and "Upgrade Distance" and "Upgrade Capacity" make a tower reach further or carry more customers. At the end of every in-game day you pick one of two reward cards, so the town grows at the same pace as your toolbox. The game is a quick, tense little puzzle about placing things in the right spot, a few seconds before it is too late.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait while the game loads (about 11 MB, downloaded only when you press the button). The menu has a Start button and an option to turn the tutorial on or off. The tutorial walks you through the first customer and the controls and is worth a look the first time. The whole game is played with the mouse.

Controls

Tips

Pause to think. You can pause, pick a card and place it without the town growing around you.

Watch the yellow circles. A yellow customer is one step from red; a tower in the right place, or an upgrade, can win them back before they count against you.

Zoom out. Seeing the whole town helps you place towers where they will be needed in a minute, not only where they are needed now.

FAQ

Is it free to play? Yes. The game is free software under the BSD 3-Clause licence.

There are some errors in the browser console. Is something wrong? The game prints a few harmless messages when the town is created; they do not affect play. The original game has the same messages.

Does it work on a phone? It is made for a mouse, so a computer is best.

Credits and licence

Mini Mobile Network Operator was made by Hendrik Wilka in under 48 hours for Ludum Dare 59 (theme "Signal") with Godot Engine, which is licensed under the MIT licence. The code and the artwork (drawn in GIMP) are under the BSD 3-Clause licence, and according to the author no generative AI was used to make the game. The font is Montserrat, licensed under the SIL Open Font License. The original project is from Godot 4.6 and runs here on Godot 4.7.2. One change was needed: a call that was inside an assert in the original, which Godot drops from release builds, is now made outside of it, so that the first houses appear.

The licence texts, including the notices of the libraries inside the Godot engine, and the source of this build are linked from this page.