What decides the order
Three columns are easy to draw and hard to keep honest. What keeps them honest is a short list of things we will not trade away, and most of the ordering above falls out of it.
The simulation comes first. Everything that matters happens on the server, continuously, whether you are watching or not. A feature that only works while your tab is open is not finished, which is why deadlines, payroll and self-service all shipped as things the world does to you rather than things you do to the world.
Real streets, not a diagram of them. The map is the real road network of a real city, and vehicles follow it at the resolution of an actual route. Anything that would quietly replace that with an abstraction — a straight line, a teleport, a timer that ends a trip — loses to whatever preserves it.
Judgement over lookup. You learn this economy by running it, not by reading it. That is a deliberate choice about what kind of game this is, and it is why the guides explain what depends on what while leaving the arithmetic to the game. It also shapes the roadmap: a feature that hands you the answer is worth less to us than one that gives you a better question.
Nothing to win with money. The livery shop is cosmetic and will stay that way. Anything that ever lets you buy your way past a decision the game is built to make interesting is not on this page and will not be.
Build in the open. The devlog records what actually shipped, in the developers' own words, usually several times a week. If something here has been “in development” for a long time without a devlog entry to show for it, that is a fair thing to ask us about.
What we are deliberately not building
Drive Your Way is a dispatcher's game. You choose the contract, the vehicle, the driver and the route; your drivers do the driving, and the founder-driver on your roster is one of them. There is no steering wheel on the screen, and the game is built around that choice rather than in spite of it. The camera follows a vehicle so you can see the city your company works in — not so you can take the wheel.
We are not building artificial pressure. There are no timers that exist to be bought off, no energy bars, no queues that a purchase would skip. The pressure in the game is the pressure of the work: a deadline you set yourself by choosing the driver, a payroll that comes due because you hired, a vehicle that stops because you sent it out on fumes.
And we are not building a schedule. Dates on a roadmap are promises about the future made with today's information, and we would rather tell you what shipped than apologise for what did not.
How to read the three columns
Live today means playable in the current build, as described. If a card here contradicts what you see in the game, the card is wrong and we would like to know through the contact page.
In development means work is under way and there is either a devlog entry or a visible partial result to point at. It does not mean soon. It means real.
On the horizon means intended. The design exists, the direction is settled, and the order of the four cards is roughly the order we expect to reach them — but any of them can move, and one of them could be replaced by something better we learn from watching people play.
Recently moved to Live
The most useful thing this page can tell you is what changed. These crossed from the middle column to the left one recently, each with the devlog entry that marked it:
- Plan the route before anything moves — the planner now opens before departure, not after.
- Deliveries run against a clock — every contract carries a delivery window, and the payout steps down past it.
- Vehicles that take themselves to the pump — a low tank or a worn vehicle sorts itself out after the run, and asks when it cannot.
- Payroll is not a suggestion — an account that cannot cover wages starts losing drivers.
- Your driver's skill is written into the route — a rookie covers more road than you planned, and pays for it in fuel and time.
Where feedback goes
Priorities on this page shift with what players run into. If a mechanic feels wrong, if a card describes something you cannot find, or if the thing you most want is missing from all three columns, the contact page is the way to say so. We read everything, and the horizon column has changed because of it before.