DEVLOG

The Pivot — Pick Your Last Job

Boss creation has been overhauled. You no longer pick a "management style" from a list of generic archetypes. You pick your last job— Head of Finance, Customer Service, Maintenance, what-have-you. That selection becomes your boss's home department, and from it the leadership style is auto-derived (Head of Legal implies Bureaucrat, Head of Sales implies Enforcer, etc.).

On top of the home dept, you pick two secondary divisions you'll be permitted to recruit from on day one. Marg's onboarding gift comes in star-stratified: a 3★ from your home, a 2★ from secondary A, a 1★ from secondary B. Three depts unlocked. Eight to earn.

Every dept that isn't one of your starters has its own building. You don't have to clear them all — you choose which to chase. The combinatorics on opening hands alone are massive: a Legal / Custodial / Maintenance start plays nothing like a Sales / Marketing / IT one.

The "you ran out of employees" softlock is also dead. First catastrophic wipe gets a one-time $4 budget loan from Marg. Second wipe ends the run with the new Department Liquidated cinematic — a closing memo from the Bureau, your run stats baked into the prose, the heavy red TERMINATED stamp slammed across the file.

TRIPLICATE — A Bureaucratic Rhythm Game

A second minigame joined the break room: TRIPLICATE, a rhythm/timing piece reskinned from a previous mobile project of mine (Plinkulator, Flame/Flutter). Three inbox trays. A paper FORM slides back and forth in each. Tap RUSH (+) or HOLD (−) to dial each form's priority. Smacking the form into the wall stamps it APPROVED in green mode, REVISIONS REQUESTED in red. Score is forms processed.

The level curve and level-thresholds and streak multipliers and charge- bar drain rate are all ported faithfully from the original — the tuning survives the reskin. What changes is the read. Stamp slams beat abstract bumper hits. "Manager's Attention" beats "Charge Bar." A mode flip from APPROVE → REVISE feels like an inbox going hostile.

Unlocks at one battle won. Lives in the break room next to GridFired, Solitaire, and Spreadsheet. Forms in triplicate.

Parking Lot Promoted to Base Game

The Parking Lot DLC is no longer DLC. The three blue-collar departments — Custodial, Parking, Maintenance — and the parking-garage Fieldwork mode all ship as part of the base 1.0 release. No SKU. No entitlement gate.

The roster of nemeses tripled. Six new rivals authored at the same lore depth as the office cast: Sgt. Mara Holcombe (40-year night shift, has outlasted eight Directors), Tully Bayard (Floor Wax Specialist, perfect record on lobby reflectivity), Officer Adelle Vex (knows your license plate, has known it since you applied), Reg "Two-Tone" Castelli (owns three impounds, none of which are listed in the same database), Augie "Pipes" Drummond (has been in the basement since 1987, the building runs on him), and Ms. Yvette Korr (master key ring, knows every false ceiling).

Three new dept-specific buildings authored to round out the unlock graph: Personnel Annex (HR), Service Center (Customer Service), and Logistics Yard (Operations). The city map now adapts to each save — you only see buildings for depts you don't already have, so the front door to your campaign is shaped by your starter pick.

Bench Passives, Per Position

Bench composition was a forgotten lever. Eleven departments, each with a unique aura passive (HR's Coffee Run, IT's Phishing Hooks, Marketing 's Brand Buzz, Legal's Paper Trail, Parking's No Parking) — but the aura fired squad-wide. Two benched HRs healed harder than one. Trivial decision.

No more. Each benched unit's aura now only affects the row matching that unit's bench position. A Legal benched in TOP puts the enemy's TOP active unit on probation. A Custodial benched in MID cleanses your MID active unit. Bench composition is now a real strategy puzzle — you have to think about which dept goes where to project the right aura on the right active row.

Combat log + bench card UI + tooltips all updated to surface the row targeting clearly. "Coffee Run · TOP" instead of "Coffee Run." Tag-swap paths now correctly carry the new _backup_pos across the line so the aura tracks the moving unit.