Update 0.4.0 — Scouting, Driver Traits, Driver Academy & a Talking Tutorial

Update 0.4.0 — Scouting, Driver Traits, Driver Academy & a Talking Tutorial

The biggest update since The Undercut began. The driver market is now a real game system. Money management matters. Every driver, team and circuit has a profile page. And the entire game is voice-guided for new players.

The free demo is updated with everything below.

⭐ Driver Scouting — The Headline

Driver stats are no longer public. Everyone starts partially hidden.

• New Scouting department — your 8th infrastructure. Its level sets your scouting capacity per GP.
• The Drivers app is now the Scouting Center: reveal-as-you-scout columns, favorites, contract-aware badges, and salary estimates that sharpen as your knowledge grows.
• Missions tab — track your running observations, reallocate or stop them, and review your scouting history.
• What you learn is never unlearned — and AI teams scout too, feeding the paddock rumour mill all season.

Scout before you sign. A cheap driver with red traits is no bargain.

🎭 Driver Traits

Drivers now carry hidden personality and skill traits — late brakers, tyre whisperers, hot heads, prodigies, toxic teammates. Each trait has real effects:

• On-track: braking, cornering, tyre wear, pressure resistance, mistakes
• Off-track: fame, teammate morale, team chemistry
• Traits range from negative (yellow → red) to positive (green → blue → purple)

🎓 Driver Academy

Build the new Driver Academy — your 9th infrastructure department. Grow your own talent:

• Junior slots (16–18) and development slots (18–21)
• Prospects 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
• Team Profile — honours, prestige, infrastructure, car ranking, sponsors, suppliers, per-season history
• Circuit Profile — track map, key facts, race history, lap record, contracts
• Every name in the game is clickable — from News, Standings, Calendar, Mail, anywhere

🎙️ A Tutorial That Talks

• Completely reworked onboarding with step-by-step guided phases
• Full voice-over — every tutorial card is read aloud
• Win95 hover tooltips everywhere — every stat, column, badge and bar explains itself on mouse-over

💰 Economy & AI Overhaul

• Team value, equity sales & bank loans — sell shares to survive (game over below 50% ownership) or take a bank loan
• AI teams run balanced / aggressive / conservative financial models — they save when struggling, sign pay drivers when broke, downgrade facilities in a crisis
• TV broadcast rights paid each pre-season
• Championship prize pool doubled
• Team bankruptcies announced in the News

📝 Contracts & Market

• Contracts honoured to term — no more silent early departures
• Driver ambition and objectives — missing them costs happiness and can push a star to the exit
• Mid-season signing window at GP 10
• Driver retirements keep the talent pool fresh across seasons

🔧 Car & R&D

• Car and R&D merged into one app — cleaner workflow
• Design projects sized freely with a continuous slider
• Production tab — manufacture parts from blueprints, rush for +50%
• Regulation pressure — miss a mandatory redesign and you start on rushed "Poor" parts

📰 News App

A proper media dashboard: clickable headlines with team logos, latest results, in-focus stories, and paddock rumours. The sport feels alive around you.

🛠️ Performance

• Fixed a massive GPU memory leak
• Saves no longer freeze the game (async save — fixes the 10–20s Windows hitch)
• Windows: resizable window from launch

Try It

This is the version we've been building toward. The demo is updated — if you tried it before and wanted more depth, this is the build to come back to.

Play the Demo · Wishlist the Full Game · Join Discord