Changelog

Follow new updates and improvements to Booker Blitz.

September 27th, 2026

Booker Blitz Pre-Release - AND STIL... YOUR SHOW

Your promotion just leveled up — Match Wizard where Add Match used to live, sponsors writing checks per show, a storyline desk that drag-and-drops sides, and a medic for every injury. Strap in. We’re going live.

Strap in. We’re going live.

It’s showtime.

Main Event — Book the Card, Call the Finish

Forget the old Add Match button. That gimmick’s been buried.

Match Wizard is your full-screen heel authority figure: Setup → Participants → Flow → Finish. Drag talent onto sides like you’re building a WarGames cage. Put the title on the line. Lock the ref. Dial pacing and entrance order. Then call the finish. Period. Layout’s tighter now — compact participants and step 3, smaller title pedestal, self-scrolling suggestions that sit above the roster on the wrestlers tab.

Wizard shortcuts keep you in the headset: shared key set + on-screen legend, Space to advance, Ctrl+1–9 to jump, highlight while Ctrl’s held.

Segment Wizard is the promo/angle machine: Duration → Sides → Location → Parts. Up to six sides. Up to eight drag-and-reorder parts. Shared minute budget. Storyline suggestions. One-click Start Storyline. Managers auto-attach with their clients. Every part drives live-feed narration.

Special Matches — debuts, returns, retirements, career vs career, loser leaves, dream matches, storyline blowoffs. Debut checkboxes per side. Dedicated live-feed beats. Post-show fallout that sticks.

Ringside managers: auto-booked with clients; tag sides share one ringside manager; Ctrl/Cmd+click adds to the last side.

Money & Angles — Sponsors + Storyline Desk

Sponsorship deals: obligation contracts, monthly fee plus per-show bonus. Book a named sponsorship segment on the card — it pays out when it’s booked.

Storyline side builder: drag-and-drop sides, roster panel, suggestions by card position (upper / mid / lower), with POP / CHA / MIC on the cards so you book heat, not vibes.

Anonymous interference from Match Wizard or Gorilla Position: half the crowd pops, +6 rating bonus per storyline touched.

The Mic, The Bell, The Broadcast

Ring announcers are Key Staff. They run Announcement / Injury / Hype. Interviewers own Interviews. Commentators stay on the desk — they fill the announcer slot only if there’s no ring announcer booked.

Going live: show logo burst + commentary broadcast intro before segment one. Talent voices their own promos and interviews. Commentators alternate calls.

After the bell: the ring announcer calls the result — different call for a new champ vs a retain — and re-announces if you change the booked finish.

Match history remembers sides and tags the bout like a real card: “A & B vs C & D.”

Locker Room — Contracts, Trainers, Medics

Contracts with teeth: unhappy talent refuse renewals; happy talent re-sign at a discount; popularity shapes the ask; rival talent off-limits until within 60 days of expiry (Expiring Soon filter); staff on the same table; AI poaches → inbox Counter or Let Them Walk. Contract Improve is gone (future endeavored gag still allowed).

Trainers: up to four trainees per trainer (Staff → Trainers, trainer detail, or wrestler-header picker). Trainees can grow Charisma, Mic Skills, and Hardcore after matches — gated by trainer skills, morale, and facilities. Trainers and scouts now share a single Staff tab.

Medics: dedicated per injury, staff assignments, can shave recovery, inbox when cleared.

Roster Tools & Presentation

Roster columns: mic skills, condition, injury proneness, morale
Free agents filter on Talent
Bulk roster actions: wishlist + bulk-selection in context menus
New Game promotion preview rail (champions / staff / shows); seed from .bbdb archive (wrestlers / promotions / alliances / start date / image path); wider custom DB modal
Achievements: per-achievement artwork on toasts + list; locked dimmed
Title cards: belts + champion portraits behind stats
Custom themes: import .bbtheme from Settings → Theme
Navbar: full promotion name; shortened balance expands on hover; k / M hover polish
Staff screens overhaul; ringside on booking cards + Live Event columns; refreshed default datapack

Called Up — Playtest & Exit

Playtest builds: six-month cap, build badge + support banner, build-limit modal until start date.

Save and quit: themed dialog replaces the native OS exit prompt. Quit from title/menu? No save nag — save-on-exit only in session.

Fixes — Housekeeping After the Bell

Live event switch resets sim + screen; show intro tracked per event. Special-match stipulations save at booking; modifier survives into Gorilla; debut doesn’t override your retirement pick; loser-leaves lands on the right promo. No unknown-wrestler interference when nobody interfered. Trainer pairings clear on release / promo change / role change. Dialog positioning, wrapping tab borders, missing Key Staff labels cleaned.

Also cleaned: cards layout; undo/redo participants; title history seed; referees only assigned to show; contracts persist past AI budget gate; tag/trios tournament sides; wrestler picker Enter/portraits/team filter focus; storylines VS badge/gender filter/reset; New Game preview sticky + light theme text; dashboard top wrestlers = in-ring only; light theme build banner; Alt-tap focus ring; space leaves results; build-limit modal timing; datapack start date/image path reset.

Backstage — The Production Truck

DataStudio spun out of the game build in 0.2.0 — own app, own versioning, released / out now, download from the Booker Blitz landing page. Cook datapacks without waiting on a game update. Game no longer ships it. Release tooling versions game / DataStudio / docs separately. Playwright E2E on every PR. CI pins Node 22.

0.3.0 sharpened Datastudio further: configurable DB export / import, remembered export folder, self-updates, writable workspace in packaged builds, mdb-reader. Game asar no longer carries Datastudio modules; packaged output trimmed.

build:game target wizard: steam / internal / playtest / demo. Signed build-target manifest. SteamPipe upload. Locked builds block inspector and remote debugging.

House style: neon → theme tokens, shared components, docs literary staff-portrait prompts.

Closing Bell

Match Wizard. Segment Wizard. Special-stip theater. Real announcers. Trainers who matter. Contracts with teeth. Sponsors on the card. Drag-and-drop storylines. A medic on every injury. Anonymous interference that pops half the building. DataStudio free on the landing page — and sharper every drop.

You book the chaos. You call the shots.

And still… your show.

It’s showtime.

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August 26th, 2026

0.1.4 - Gorilla Position, Database Curation, Contracts & More

Booker Blitz just hit v0.1.4, and it's a big enough update that I want to start doing what I said I would back in the intro post: actual devlogs. This one covers the last few weeks of work: the Gorilla Position rework, unlimited saves, a wrestler database curation pass, contract negotiations, Datastudio, and a full roster/staff screen redesign.

Title Screen & Saves

First thing you'll notice: the title screen isn't a stack of buttons anymore. It's a card dashboard now: Continue, New Game, Load Game, Settings, Datapack Editor, Documentation, all as their own entry points, styled to match the rest of the neon-cyberpunk UI.

The bigger change is underneath it. Booker Blitz used to cap you at 3 save slots in IndexedDB. That's gone. Saves are now real files on disk (.bbsave), so you can have as many as you want, name them, and see a proper recent-saves list with the promotion, in-game date, playtime, and last-modified time for each one. Continue loads whatever you played last. If a save file goes missing or gets corrupted, it shows up greyed out instead of silently breaking. Old slot-based saves still load fine, they're mapped internally to virtual paths so nothing gets orphaned.

Segment Simulation Goes Full-Screen

This was the biggest chunk of work in the update. The segment simulation dialog, the screen where you watch and steer a match live, got rebuilt from a centered modal into a full-screen production experience.

Structurally, the match now moves through five visible phases: Entrances → Early Match → Spots → Match Ending → Post Match, shown as a bar instead of a clock ticking down. Around that, I added a bunch of new levers:

Referee state: refs can now get knocked down mid-match. While they're down you can wake them up or make the call to send them out and bring in a new one, which has real fiction attached to it depending on who wins and what you chose.

Interference: managers and ringside personnel can throw a towel, start a chant, distract the ref, or throw in a weapon. Distracting the ref too many times costs you crowd rating, and chants are capped so they don't get spammed.

Wrestler pace controls: slow down, pick it up, taunt, work the crowd, each with its own rating tradeoff, live, from the Gorilla Position.

Weapon flow: throwing a weapon opens a choice modal depending on whether the ref is active or down. Throw it out, use it and take the DQ, or counter it.

Everything routes through a new match production engine with its own set of narrative results per action, so the play-by-play reflects the calls you made instead of describing a generic match.

Database Curation

Wrestlers were the focus of this pass. I went through the roster in the default universe and did a full manual curation sweep: new portraits, cleaned-up names, capped duplicate finishers so you don't see the same move on five different wrestlers, proper champions, key staff, and promotion rosters. Free agents, powerhouses, comedy wrestlers: each got its own pass rather than being generated and left alone.

This is a "wrestlers first" release. The next curation pass is aimed at staff, plus fixing the issues that came out of the closed playtest. I'd rather ship the wrestler-facing stuff now than hold everything for one giant pass.

Datastudio Update

Datastudio is the companion app for building and editing the databases Booker Blitz runs on, and it got a substantial update this release. The promotion editor went from one long scrolling form to proper tabs (Overview, House Shows, Key Staff, Shows & Titles, Teams, Facilities), there's a new Arenas section and a Stats panel showing database health at a glance, and the wrestler/promotion lists now support keyboard shortcuts (search, save, arrow-key cycling), the same keyboard-first philosophy as the main game.

On the import side, Datastudio now supports .db databases directly and .mdb support is in as an experimental format, alongside the existing "create a database from a save" flow, so you can pull a running game's roster out and turn it into a fresh datapack to edit or share.

Contracts & Negotiations

Contract negotiation used to be closer to a single yes/no roll. Now it's a real back-and-forth: talent can counter your offer, negotiations run over multiple rounds, and I rebalanced the odds of an offer landing versus getting rejected outright so lowball offers get pushed back on instead of failing silently.

Non-exclusive contracts now behave like actual monthly renewals instead of fixed terms: they show appearance rate and booking cap instead of a progress bar, auto-renew every 30 days, and releasing one carries no penalty (exclusive early terminations still cost you the remaining wages). Expiry notifications now fire 10 days out, and you get pinged when a wrestler joins or a contract renews.

Roster, Talent & Staff Redesign

Roster, Wrestler Detail, Staff, Staff Detail, and the External Talent/Staff screens all got a visual and functional overhaul. The headline feature: you can now group your roster by card or by orientation, on top of the filters that were already there. Avatar hover-previews, checkbox multi-select with a bulk-action bar, column visibility toggles: all the datatable screens share the same set of components now instead of each one reinventing selection and bulk actions. Staff Detail also picked up a real assignments card that shows every show, PPV, and promotion role that staff member currently holds.

What's Next

Staff curation is the next big content pass, plus working through the backlog from the closed playtest. If you want to follow along or push feedback into what gets built, join r/BookerBlitz or wishlist on Steam. A lot of this release came directly from people telling me what felt off.

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August 3rd, 2026

v0.1.2 is ready

What's New in Booker Blitz v0.1.2

Managers are a real part of the game now. Assign a manager to any wrestler from their profile, or build out a manager's full client list from their own staff page. Book a managed wrestler into a match or segment and their manager comes ringside with them, so you never have to add them by hand. Managers cut promos too, and commentary knows they're out there, so they get name-dropped during matches.

The Storyline Recommender thinks in teams. It used to suggest feuds for singles wrestlers only. Tag teams and stables now get the same treatment: if a team has no active storyline, ranked opponent suggestions show up on their team card, with an "Add to Storyline" button that pulls the whole team in as a unit.

Turn an entire team heel or face in one click. The new Switch Orientation action flips a tag team or stable's alignment together, and you can leave individual members out for a betrayal angle. The turn gets logged to your inbox, and everyone who turns picks up a small popularity bump for the heat.

PPVs get their own broadcast booth. Set dedicated commentators, interviewers and referees per PPV instead of falling back on whoever's assigned to the promotion. Assignments stick for future editions of the event, and you can edit them from the Staff screen or the PPV's own detail page.

Finding outside talent got easier. The External Talent screen has a separate Staff tab, so you can search rival promotions and free agents for commentators, referees and other staff, not just wrestlers. Role badges and filters included.

Also in this build: save slots show the player name, the title screen displays the current game version, and the Datapack Editor picked up new tabs for managing Shows and Alliances. New Game, Load Game and the Title screen all got a round of polish, and I fixed a batch of missing translation strings.

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