Management games often place players in charge of an entire city, or, in some cases, a country or even a planet. But Minami Lane, the recently released cozy management game from France-based duo Blibloop and Doot, focuses instead on a single street. As the manager of the titular Minami Lane, players select which shops to open, customize their menus, and keep visitors and residents happy. Doot and Blibloop chose a single street for Minami Lane because it allowed them to keep the game’s scale small while still achieving the desired cozy aesthetic.
In a conversation with Game Rant, the pair explained that Minami Lane is their largest collaboration to date. They had previously worked together on Game Jam projects made in 1–3 days. They wanted Minami Lane to be “larger but not too much larger,” with a reasonable scope but still something bigger than what could be created within a Game Jam’s limited scope. The result is a cozy game that puts just one street under the player’s control, giving them plenty to do without feeling overwhelmed.
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The Single Street Was Chosen To Keep The Game Tiny
Once the team decided they wanted to make a management game, the original pitch was a more traditional city-focused game. However, Doot worried about the scale of the game, which he wanted to keep tiny. “Blibloop had an idea, or I had an idea, and then we said, OK, how do we make it smaller?” he explained. It was during one of these discussions about how to shrink the game to a more manageable size that they ultimately came up with the idea of focusing on a single street.
In Blibloop’s opinion, the decision was the correct one. Not only did it prevent the game from getting too big, but it also allowed her to effectively portray the cozy, wholesome, anime-inspired aesthetic she had created. Blibloop described the game’s art style as a mixture of Eastward, A Space for the Unbound, and the works of the legendary Studio Ghibli. And the cozy, close-knit street, which is home to a mix of tanuki and cats as well as people, definitely fits the Ghibli-like aesthetic the artist desired.
Street Development Made The Idea “Click”
Doot and Blibloop explained that it actually took them quite a while to come up with the idea for what eventually became Minami Lane. They knew they wanted something within the management genre after the success of their last Game Jam game, Poda Wants a Statue, in which players manage the construction of a statue for a demanding panda god. It took several discussions, and several ultimately discarded ideas, before the cute, Japan-inspired, cat-filled street of the final game came to be.
Before that, the idea was more of a traditional city builder, maybe a decoration game, or something like that. We had a lot of trouble getting to this tiny scope and tiny pitch, and then we said, “OK, maybe we cannot do this. Maybe we can’t do a city. And if we can’t do something like that, then why not a street?” That’s where it clicked. When you think of tiny, cute streets, you instantly have this vision in your head.
As for why they wished to keep the game’s scale so small, the idea of creating a cozy, wholesome experience was only part of it. Doot and Blibloop are relatively new to the world of game development – Doot quit his job to develop games full-time just over a year ago, and Minami Lane is his second project after the action roguelike game, Froggy’s Battle. He explained that a small game let them learn the ins and outs of development without getting overwhelmed. Ultimately, they cut many planned ideas to keep the focus on the game’s single street – but Minami Lane was a success, and larger projects may be in the team’s future.
Minami Lane is currently available on Steam. Doot and Blibloop’s other tiny games are available on itch.io.