Train yourself: you can now put money and time into your own developer skills instead of spending skill points. Like language training, you choose between self-study, part-time and full-time; full-time takes you off your projects for the duration.
Studio profile: specializations are no longer a checklist but a profile. How many can be active at once depends on your office — a garage carries one, a headquarters carries several. Switching costs nothing, so you can always rethink what your studio stands for.
Mentoring: an experienced founder gets new staff up to speed faster. The more experience you have overall, the shorter their training runs.
Speed breakdown: the Expertise tab now shows where your current project's development speed comes from — office, language level, skills, specializations, equipment, hardware, tech stack and frameworks, listed individually and sorted by impact.
Improvements
Banked skill experience survives training. Spending a skill point used to wipe the progress bar, which made it best to only ever train on an empty bar.
Expertise works: experience in a field makes your studio noticeably faster and less bug-prone on similar projects. The tab used to be display only.
Architecture and testing finally have an effect. Architecture lowers the effective complexity of your work, testing speeds up test coverage — and both now earn their own experience from the work that suits them.
Company-wide bonuses apply to the whole team. Expertise and specializations only ever sped up your own work, which made them worthless in a grown studio.
Project management raises your recommended project capacity — one extra project per five levels.
Harder projects pay more skill points: one to four depending on complexity, instead of a flat one.
Locked specializations list their requirements with progress — met ones in green, open ones in grey. They used to show nothing but a price and a greyed-out button.
Market cards show your expertise bonus for that project once you have experience in the field.
Specializations now work within their field instead of everywhere at once. The Backend Specialist speeds up database and API work but no longer a graphics project. In exchange their price scales with depth: early profiles are cheaper, ones behind prerequisites cost more.
Bugs become rare with experience but no longer vanish entirely. A fully built studio used to ship flawlessly, which made the testing phase and QA staff meaningless.
The descriptions in the Specializations tab have room to breathe and no longer run into the price column.
Three specialization bonuses that were listed but never applied now work: longer deadlines, happier clients and lower effective complexity. The Enterprise Architect and the Business Developer were missing two thirds of their promised effect.
The skills tutorial now describes the game that actually exists — in every language.