Find My Car - v1.8.0 "Dusk Falls on the Lot"

Until now the game was always set at night. Now time passes on every lot.

• One day lasts 21 minutes of play: bright afternoon sun, a warm golden hour with long shadows across the aisles, a blue dusk, a long night, and a soft pink dawn before it all starts again.
• The clock carries on between lots and is saved. Finish a lot at dusk and the next one starts at dusk.
• The lamps come on one by one. At dusk each lamp post switches on at its own moment. Like real sodium lamps, they start with a dim red glow before reaching full orange. At dawn they switch off the same way.
• Car paint reflects the sky of the moment: blue by day, orange during golden hour, dark at night.
• Winter changes with the time of day too. By day a blizzard is bright white instead of grey, and the snowy lot is toned down so it doesn't glare.
• Broken lamps spark in daylight. At night a broken lamp flickers. By day you can't see that, so it now sprays sparks from its head and you can still spot it from a distance.

The sun stays fixed in the world, so shadows always fall across the aisles. We tried turning it with the camera, and every shadow swung round whenever you turned.

🌳 The upgrade tree, rebuilt

A player reported maxing out every upgrade on the 10,000-car lot, and they were right: earnings grow by multiplying together (reward × key range × pace × drones × scanner), and the old prices couldn't keep up.

So we stopped tuning prices by hand. Prices now come from an economy simulator calibrated on real playtest data:

• Price ladders grow steadily instead of flattening out, so the last levels stay meaningful.
• Paths were trimmed where the final levels did nothing you could notice. Every purchase should be felt.
• Drone fleet: up to 25 drones, with prices that rise more steeply toward the end.
• Level caps per lot. Some levels unlock only once you've finished bigger lots, so you can't race through the whole tree on one lot.
• Target: a typical player should take roughly 8–9 hours to finish the tree, and a very active one around 5. These are simulator estimates, and we'll keep checking them against real play.

Your existing progress carries over: your levels are mapped onto the new ladders by their strength.

🎯 Big lots are a proper hunt again

On lots of 10,000 cars and up, running straight ahead often found your car after checking only about a tenth of the lot. Now:

• The colour of your car is announced at the start, as before.
• The actual car is picked later, once you've checked a good part of the lot. It's drawn from the cars of that colour that are far from you (though not always in the opposite corner).

Big lots now feel like the search they're meant to be.

🛴 New faces on the lot

• Scooter riders pass through your aisle. They steer around you and around cars pulling out, and shout a warning as they go by.
• Panicking runners sprint between the rows, glancing at cars and muttering to themselves. When they find their car, they're gone in a moment.

❄️ Winter polish

• Tracks in the snow. Riders' scooters leave a tyre groove, and cars leave twin tyre tracks when you drive one out for an NPC or an owner drives away. These join the footprints and cart tracks that were already there.
• Brushing snow off a car is much better:
  • When you stand at a car you're helping clear, the camera moves above it and looks straight down, so you can see and reach its whole top.
  • Your finger now lands exactly where you point. Before, it aimed at an invisible box around the car that was taller and wider than the car itself, so some spots, especially on the far side, were impossible to clear.
  • The brush is wider, so one swipe clears a proper band of snow.
• Pausing during a blizzard no longer clears the sky and then drops the storm back in when you return.
• The storm fog and the background now match, so the far rows fade into the blizzard without a dark band behind them.

🔧 Fixes

• Fixed the map screen showing a pale background during the day.
• Fixed one particular lamp post that stayed lit through broad daylight.
• Fixed a lamp being lit by day on the very first lot.
• Tapping quickly no longer turns into a pinch-zoom by accident. Two-finger zoom only starts when both fingers touch down together.
• A second finger on a button no longer starts a gesture in the world.
• Fixed a scooter rider occasionally riding through the boundary fence.
• Stamina now drains a little faster when you run faster, though each bar still carries you further than before. The stamina card in the shop shows the real distance.

🔍 Behind the scenes

This release also went through an automated code review of the day and night cycle. A second AI model read the code independently, and the issues it confirmed were fixed before release. That's where a few of the fixes above came from.