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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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 check out the official website (bookerblitz.com) . A lot of this release came directly from people telling me what felt off. So let me know your feedback about how this is coming along