Update 0.4.0 — Scouting, Profiles & a Talking Tutorial

0.4.0 is the biggest update since the closed alpha began. It turns the driver market into a real game system, gives every driver, team and circuit a proper profile page, overhauls money management for you and the AI, and adds a fully voiced tutorial across the whole game. It’s live now for closed-test players — and the free Steam demo is updated too.

The Undercut — new Team Profile page with honours, prestige, driver line-up, infrastructure, car ranking, sponsors and suppliers

⭐ Driver Scouting — The Headline

Driver stats are no longer public. Everyone starts partially hidden — run scouting observations to reveal their true ratings and hidden traits.

  • New Scouting department (your 8th infrastructure): its level sets your scouting capacity in work-units per GP.
  • The Drivers app is now the Scouting Center: reveal-as-you-scout columns, favorites (star + filter), contract-aware status badges and a salary column that sharpens as your knowledge grows.
  • A Missions tab shows your running observations (reallocate or stop them) and a Past missions history — completed, ongoing and abandoned.
  • What you learn is never unlearned — and AI teams scout too, feeding the paddock rumour mill all season.

Driver Traits

Drivers now carry hidden personality and skill traits (0–5 each) in negative (yellow → red) and positive (green → blue → purple) tiers: late brakers, tyre whisperers, hot heads, prodigies, toxic teammates… All of them have real on-track effects — braking, cornering, tire wear, pressure resistance, mistakes — plus off-track ones (fame, teammate morale). Scout before you sign: a cheap driver with red traits is no bargain.

Driver Academy

Build the new Driver Academy department (your 9th) to grow your own talent: junior (16–18) and development (18–21) slots auto-fill with prospects who develop like signed drivers and can be promoted to your race team cheaply.

Profile pages for everything

  • Driver Profile: identity, scouting-gated attributes, traits, contract, full career record — with Negotiate / Scout / Favorite actions.
  • Team Profile: honours, prestige & outlook, infrastructure, car ranking, sponsors, suppliers, per-season history.
  • Circuit Profile: track map, key facts, full race history, lap record, contracts.
  • Every driver, team and circuit name in the game is clickable and opens its profile — from News, Standings, Calendar, Mail, anywhere.

A tutorial that talks

  • Completely reworked onboarding: a quick tour of every app, a pre-season roadmap, then step-by-step guided phases with spotlit walkthroughs in every app (Infrastructure department-by-department, Scouting column-by-column, the full R&D workshop, profiles, race weekends…).
  • Full voice-over: every tutorial card is read aloud — career, R&D guides and the live-2D race walkthroughs. Mute/unmute from any card; replay any app’s guide with the yellow ”?” button.
  • Win95 hover tooltips everywhere: every stat, column, badge and bar across Scouting, Car, R&D, Sponsors, Suppliers, profiles and the supplier negotiation dialog explains itself on mouse-over.

💰 Economy & AI

  • Team value, equity sales & bank loans in the Finance app. Sell shares to survive (game over below 50 % ownership), or take one reputation-scaled bank loan. AI teams use the same levers.
  • Pluggable AI money management: teams now run balanced / aggressive / conservative financial models with a season plan — they save when struggling, sign pay drivers when broke, downgrade facilities in a crisis (and it makes the news). New “AI Financial Intelligence” slider in Settings.
  • TV broadcast rights: every team receives a yearly package each pre-season.
  • Championship prize pool doubled — finishing position matters a lot more at season end.
  • Season-end reputation re-evaluation for every team, driven by results, facilities and revenue.
  • Finance projections you can trust: race and championship prize money are now included, and the tiles reconcile with the Net.
  • Team bankruptcies are announced in the News; folded teams stop negotiating and their drivers return to the market correctly.

📝 Contracts, market & season flow

  • Contracts are honoured to the term — no more silent early departures; drivers leave when their deal ends (or when they want out).
  • Driver ambition & objectives: every driver has a season objective and a long-term goal; missing them costs happiness — and can push a star to the exit.
  • Mid-season signing window at GP 10: a free weekend to negotiate next-season deals — the AI market moves at the same time.
  • Driver retirements keep the talent pool fresh; new generations join the pool (and are scoutable) every season.

🔧 Car & R&D

  • Car and R&D merged into one app — one tab bar: Car · Inventory · Production · Repair · Improve · Design · Design N+1 · Projects.
  • R&D Design overhaul: size projects freely with a continuous slider (bigger = more WU and more GPs, more performance), run them in parallel within your R&D capacity, and reallocate workload per GP in Projects.
  • Production tab: designs are blueprints — manufacture parts for cash, rush them for +50 %, choose your default spec per component.
  • Part quality tiers (Poor → Perfect) rolled at delivery, gating positive trait tiers.
  • Trait fixing: remediate a discovered negative part trait as an R&D project — red traits resolve in one (3×-priced) project.
  • Regulation pressure: miss a mandatory next-year redesign and you start the season on rushed “Poor” parts.
  • Improve is spec-based end to end: upgrading a part upgrades every copy of that spec, damaged parts no longer eat WU, and repairs no longer erase development.
  • Car ratings now reflect the real simulation weightings (Speed = engine, Accel = mostly gearbox, Fuel Eff = fuel system…).

📰 News & presentation

  • The News app is a media dashboard: clickable headlines with newspaper-style category pictograms and team logos, latest results, developments, in-focus and paddock rumours panels.
  • Standings-style presentation everywhere: helmets + flags next to driver names, logos next to team names — including inside headline sentences.
  • Sidebar reordered (Hub · News · Mail · Standings · Calendar · Finance · Car · Team · Scouting…); every app is visible from day one — locked ones tell you when they open.
  • The Team app is now three tabs (Primary / Secondary / Reserve) hosting the standard driver profile, with Fire / Switch / Promote actions and confirmation dialogs.

🛠️ Performance & stability

  • Fixed a massive GPU memory leak.
  • Saves no longer freeze the game (async save worker — fixes the 10–20 s Windows “Next turn” hitch).
  • Windows: the window is resizable from launch.
  • Clean player console: all diagnostics now go to a rotating debug.log (bundled in Bug Reports).

Try It

0.4.0 is rolling out now to closed-test players, and the free demo on Steam is updated with the same build. Want in on the closed test? Come say hi on Discord.

Play the Demo · Wishlist the Full Game · Join the Discord

— Staz