Project module: clicking a project card opens the project. Planning, Team and Freelancer are tabs, with Fill and Deliver in the bar above — you ship without leaving the board. Tab switches projects and keeps you on the view you were on. And there is finally a way back that you can see.
Bank: loans in fixed tiers over 12 or 24 months. Your credit limit grows with reputation and recent income, and the rate moves with the economy — a recession or credit crunch raises it, a boom lowers it. A month in the red no longer ends the run outright: you get a grace period to trade your way out.
Keyboard shortcuts: speed, pause, every panel, next project, board/team. F1 shows the list in game, and Settings has a new Input tab. Space pauses — and resumes at the speed you were running, not at 1x.
Delivery forecast: active projects show when they are expected to finish and flag what is holding them up — nobody assigned, nothing started, deadline at risk, staff out sick.
Skill points up front: every market card shows how many skill points the job pays. You used to find out after delivering it.
Negotiation mood: the client shows how they are taking it, instead of leaving you to push blind.
Skip coding events: if you do not want the puzzle, skip it — no speed bonus, but no bug either.
Clickable notifications: click the message and it takes you to what it is about.
Improvements
The Kanban board states what a project's complexity means for work hours and bug rate.
The team list sorts assigned workers first, then idle, then unavailable.
Feature and bug sounds no longer fire as a burst when a team is doing well. Music draws from a shuffled bag and leaves gaps instead of repeating tracks.
The tutorial explains the project module. Two steps that only sent you back to the list are gone.
Active events are coloured by whether they help you. A rising interest rate used to show in the same green as a real benefit.
Balance
Maintenance contracts are a business with work in it again. They used to run with no ceiling, no servicing and no risk — collect enough and you barely needed projects. Now your office limits how many you can hold, a neglected contract loses condition and gets terminated by the client, and payment scales with the project being maintained instead of a flat rate. You keep every contract you already have; the limit only gates new ones.
Skill points get cheaper a little more slowly: the cost step now rises every four trained levels instead of every five. The early game is unchanged; the deep investments are a decision again.
Bug Fixes
Contract and product income was credited twice a month. It already reached your balance when it was paid, and was subtracted from the monthly costs on top. The books are corrected and now show what your studio actually earns.
Currency follows the selected language. After a language switch the old symbol stayed until the game was restarted.
Running events like a recession or a boom survive saving. They used to end silently on load — saving and reloading was a way to shed a bad event.
Trained skill levels survive saving, so the cost threshold does not snap back on load.
The Fill button was labelled in English in 26 languages whenever nobody was available.