Dear Screw Drivers Community,

Allow me to briefly introduce myself: Dieter here, CEO and founder of Headup. I rarely get involved with communications, so reaching out to you, the players, is somewhat new to me - hoping to strike the right tone. 😊

The reason I’m writing today is to share some happy news and give you some insight into our - well, actually, your - numbers for the game. I know it’s not common practice to do this, but I feel it might be interesting for some of you.

First, I’m thrilled to share that Screw Drivers has hit an outstanding milestone this week, thanks to all of you. The game has shattered expectations, with over half a million (yes, 500,000+) Steam users claiming it, leaving us absolutely speechless.


Here’s a breakdown of some key numbers as of this moment:

• 500,000 free licenses claimed (meaning players have added it to their library)
  
• Over 315,000 unique users have played the game so far
  
• It currently has an 87% positive user rating from about 2,500 reviews
  
• And what makes us most proud: The community has created and shared almost 13,000 (!) Workshop items for the game, ranging from cars and planes to really unique machinery. This is what we always dreamed of when we started the project - giving you the tools and watching the players go wild and create amazing things!

On behalf of both the studio and the publishing team, I want to express our deepest gratitude for joining us on this journey and dedicating your time and love to the game. We know you have countless other entertainment options competing for your time, so believe me when I say how much we appreciate the time you’ve spent with us.

On the flip side, I’d also like to share some information about the game’s financials. So far, we’ve prefunded all development and marketing efforts, by offering only a supporter pack. To be transparent, about 3,000 players have supported us with a purchase, translating to roughly 1% of all players (or 0.6% of all licenses claimed). While we’re incredibly thankful for every supporter (sending our biggest hugs), as you can see, this is not a sustainable level of income to support ongoing development in the long term. We consciously chose this route in the beginning, and the numbers and feedback have validated the relevance of the game to you and to us.

Our vision is to establish Screw Drivers as a growing and free sandbox for all engineers, drivers, and creators in the future. We don’t want to rely on FOMO-driven purchases or artificial paywalls. What I’m trying to say is: We’re on a quest to find the fairest and most honest free-to-play monetization model that will allow the game’s development to thrive without taking away the fun or opportunities from the community.

So what’s the plan? We will keep the game free. Period. Quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, more localizations, game modes, you name it. Instead of creating barriers, we want to offer more sophisticated experiences to players who want to dive deeper. While I can’t (and don’t want to 😊) reveal the exact roadmap yet, we’ll be introducing theme-based DLC packs at reasonable prices, allowing for the creation of more advanced or themed vehicles. This way, you will still be able to enjoy the game for free, but there will be an optional, additional layer for the most dedicated creators.

We’re committed to being as transparent, honest, and approachable as possible and look forward to continuing this journey with our most valuable asset - you, the players, and the time you invest in the game!

Sincerely,
Dieter
CEO/Founder, Headup


TL;DR: HALF A MILLION O_O! Thank you, thank you, thank you!


https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1279510/Screw_Drivers/

Happy Thursday, friends!

And what a Thursday it is! Just in case you didn't know yet: it's (the highly official) “Damage Model and Car Classes” Thursday today. And we're celebrating this with a new update for Screw Drivers!

Namely with the update V0.3.13.1, which is also called the “Damage Model and Car Classes” Update. for this we completely updated the damage model, and added a new UI to visualize the health of the vehicle. There are now also 37 new car classes, you can drive against the ghost of your personal best, and much more.

See for yourself:



Damage Model

We completely updated the damage model, and at the same time we added a new UI to visualize the health of the vehicle.

There are five things which changed in the way vehicles take damage:

• Before, the amount of damage taken increased when the vehicle was heavier. So a vehicle weighing 1000kg did take double the amount of damage when crashing compared to a 500kg vehicle. This is now changed, so the weight of the own vehicle doesn’t affect the amount of damage taken.
  
• Before, the amount of damage taken was linear to the velocity when crashing. Now, the amount of damage scales with the square of the velocity when crashing. This means, at lower speeds you will now take less damage than before, and when crashing with higher speeds vehicles now take more damage.
  
• Before, the damage has been propagated through the vehicle evenly. Now the damage is propagated more towards the upper parts of a vehicle, and a little less to the parts at the bottom. This is not realistic, but it helps to protect the wheels of vehicles. It also means, that you can how build some chassis construction towards the top of your vehicle to make it more resistant against crashes.
  
• If you lose engines your car will also lose power. The powertrain is not recalculated to correctly adjust the power curve, but depending on the power of the broken engine, your vehicle will lose an according percentage of total power. You can also see this in the new damage UI whenever an engine breaks apart.
  
• If you lose mechanical building blocks like gears, axles, wheels or engines, your top speed will be reduced slightly. You can also see this in the new damage UI as soon as you lose some mechanical building blocks.

On top of the top speed and power reduction, you can now also see the amount of downforce your vehicle has, and the amount of wheels that are still intact. And in the middle you can see the total damage your vehicle has taken.



New car classes

We completely overdid it, and we replaced the old car classes ranging from F to S+ with 37 new car classes. The old car classes tried to estimate, how fast a car is overall. Since that’s insanely difficult and didn’t work out that well, we now created the new car classes which categorize all vehicles according to three aspects:

• Acceleration
  
• Downforce
  
• Weight and Tip-Over

This separates all vehicles according to these three stats. There are four areas of accelerations, three areas of downforce and three differentiating vehicles by their weight and tip-over value. This makes 36 car classes. And to get to 37, we created a new car class specifically for propeller vehicles. So if your vehicle has any downforce and it has a rotatable hinge joint, it will be considered a propeller vehicle. This should help to differentiate prop cars from other cars and gives them a special leaderboard.

We will let you play around with the car classes yourself, and let us know what you think!



Drive against the ghost of your personal best

That’s right, the game now stores your personal best laps for each challenge. When you drive a challenge a second time, you can enable and disable the ghosts you wanna drive against. These are the bronze, silver and gold medals as well as your personal best and your personal best in your current car class.

Major Changes

• We added a lot of big signs to most challenges. They should help to make it more visible and more clear where the track is going and where sharp curves are ahead.
  
• New calculation of acceleration statistic (again). Now the game only looks at the power curve between 0 and 100 km/h and calculates a weighted area of the curve. This weighted area makes acceleration in lower speeds more important than acceleration values of higher speeds close to 100km/h.
  
• Added new optional challenge: Pepper Sprint

Minor Changes

• Added two entries to the general settings, where you can invert the mouse movement for the camera in driving mode.
  
• When you try to add a creative mode car or a workshop vehicle to your garage in career, the game now shows you how much money you are missing, in case you don’t have enough money to buy all the missing parts right now.
  
• We reduced the details resolution of the terrain, which reduces the amount of polygons being rendered.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug which allowed you to instantly teleport to the finish line in acceleration challenges or in A-to-B challenges.
  
• Fixed tech tree unlock condition of the worm gear. Now it can be unlocked on the Double 8 challenge or the Rock and Drift challenge.
  
• The center of mass indicator isn’t tilted anymore.
  
• In the combustion engine tutorial, the red outline wasn’t showing to indicate the removal of the small electric engine. This should now be fixed.
  
• Fixed a bug where the center of mass of all rigidbodies was calculated wrongly when repairing the vehicle.
  
• When pressing the 'X' button on the controller in the building editor, the context menu of the garage opened and closed without being visible. This is now fixed.
  
• Fixed the calculation of the tip-over value, which sometimes was higher than it actually is when using multiple rigidbodies in one vehicle.
  
• Fixed a bug where the turbo and the big combustion engine weren’t unlockable anymore in the giant bridge challenge, since I screwed up something there accidentally. Should work again now.
  
• We fixed the destructable objects which weren’t working correctly: Barrel, small fence and the lantern.

Drive safe, friends!
Marc and Simon / Creactstudios


https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1279510/Screw_Drivers/