Field updates from the Vote For Me development desk. Newest first.
v0.8.10
Accessibility
Simplified View: an accessibility option that hides flavor text and tooltip clutter while keeping every number, breakdown, and button visible. Pops up once on a fresh campaign so you can pick. Lives in Settings - Display and Settings - Accessibility after that.
Heads up: the game has a lot of flavor. Detailed view keeps it all. Pick whichever feels less noisy.
v0.8.9
Polish
Click the version number in the corner. The intern wrote things.
Picking 'New Game' from the title and then hitting Back used to drop you in Settings. Now it goes back to the title, like a reasonable person would expect.
v0.8.8
Balance
Several operations got pass-the-mic energy. Park them on too long and they start losing steam - rotate or watch the output decay. Notably affected: foreign donors, deepfakes, the social media ones, sell secrets, donor cultivation, endorsement leverage, and the national blitz.
Legacy Building now rewards sticking with it. Ramps up over the first few minutes.
Lobby Offensive used to cost three resources to produce one. Now it's a clean rep to favors trade. Costs less. Pays more.
Media Blackout and Sunday Show Prep are no longer priced for billionaires. Roughly half the cost across the board.
v0.8.7
Accessibility
New setting: Swap Sidebars. Puts the staff roster on the left and resources on the right. For left-handed mouse users and anyone whose right screen edge is hard to reach.
The two sidebar landmarks now have proper screen-reader names. They didn't before. Nobody mentioned it. Worth fixing anyway.
v0.8.6
Polish
In-game text was breaking the fourth wall in places. It stopped.
Higher-tier outcome flavor and achievement hints got tighter. The narrator stopped reaching.
The Behind the Curtain panel is gone. Nobody was reading it.
v0.8.5-d
Bug fixes
Party-selection screen no longer hides the top party off-screen. On smaller windows the blocking party picker (the one that opens at T2 before you've picked a party) centered its content with overflow-scroll on the same element, which pushed the first card's name and Join button above the top of the screen with no way to scroll up to reach them. Now it scrolls correctly: short content stays centered, tall content starts at the top so you can read every party.
v0.8.5-c
New artwork
Pixel-art icons now ship for every achievement. The eight that were still showing temp emoji (the five lobby achievements, Eyes Everywhere, The Dossier, and Thanks Obama) join the rest in the achievements panel and on Steam.
Steam now tracks Lobby Requests Fulfilled as a global lifetime stat, so the On a First-Name Basis achievement progress shows up on your Steam profile alongside the other lifetime counters.
v0.8.5-b
Gameplay
Announce your campaign before you can hire staff. Every tier kicks off with the announce ritual on the campaign rail; until you commit to an archetype, hire buttons stay disabled. Banners on the campaign screen and at the top of the staff sidebar explain the gate and point you to the rail. Auto-buy queues hold at the front of the line and resume the moment the announce lands.
New PC upgrade Read the Room (12 PC, The Game branch). Reveals the announce-modal bias hints: each archetype's flavor rule, plus a green BONUS ACTIVE badge when your current state matches it. Without the upgrade the modal stays minimal.
Balance
Electoral Calculus dropped from 700 PC to 500 PC. The Game branch's capstone was reachable only on the longest prestige runs and was sitting behind cheaper, more-impactful upgrades.
Upgrade trees now sort cleanly by cost. Late-added upgrades (Quiet Money, Lobbyist Favor Conversion, Expedited Requests, Issue Advocacy) were stuck at the end of their branches regardless of price. Re-sorted ascending so the tree reads cheap-to-expensive top-to-bottom.
UX
Main nav row sticks to the top. The Campaign / Operations / Synergy / Achievements tab row stays visible while you scroll long panel content instead of scrolling away with everything else.
Bug fixes
Tooltips no longer stick on screen after alt-tab or click-off. Hover tooltips now also close on window blur, tab visibility change, and clicks anywhere — covering the cases where mouseleave never fires.
Several missing locale keys (raw "ui.synergy.sort.byStaff" etc.) cleaned up. A handful of UI labels were rendering as raw locale keys instead of their English text.
v0.8.5-a
Bug fixes
Donor panel no longer crashes the moment you advance past the first-hire stage. A React hook-ordering bug ran an extra hook on the first render where the panel became visible, which crashed the panel subtree.
Supporters resource modal now shows slow-burn drains that are pulling on your supporter rate, and its Net rate matches what's actually happening on the bar. The drains were silently dropping out before.
v0.8.5
Balance
Lobby request XP rewards buffed, especially for the bigger requests. Old curve made larger requests worse per cost-point (50/40/37/30 XP per point); new curve flips it (100/125/167/200 XP per point). 1pt: 100 XP (was 50), 2pt: 250 (was 80), 3pt: 500 (was 110), 5pt: 1000 (was 150). PC requests feel meaningfully rewarding now — a 5pt PC fulfillment costs 25 PC for 1000 XP instead of 150.
Reputation effect on supporter generation halved. Was 1:1 (+100 rep = +100% supporters); now +100 rep = +50% supporters, +300 cap = +150% (was +300%). Negative penalty softens by the same factor (-300 rep is now 0.4x supporters, was 0.25x). Stacking rep into the late game still helps, but it's no longer a runaway.
Resource detail modals
Click Funds, Supporters, Reputation, Favors, or Media on the resource bar to open a full breakdown modal. Each one walks the math: sources, multipliers, operations, net rate, with a flavor line that reads your current state. Reputation has a ±300 bidirectional bar; Funds shows time-to-cap; Favors shows time-to-next or time-to-zero. Hover popovers still work for the quick read.
Reputation modal calls out the rep multiplier on votes as its own feedback line. Easy to miss otherwise.
Scandal mitigation rework
Crisis Manager and The Fixer now drain Scandal Heat directly instead of stacking on the % reduction cap. Compliance Officer and Media Consultant keep their % reductions; Crisis Manager and Fixer instead defuse a flat amount of heat per second and stack past the 90% cap. Stat lines now read '-0.05 heat/s' instead of '-30% scandal risk.' The flat decay also keeps draining the bar between scandal events when there's no active pressure.
Scandal Heat modal now shows subtotals at each math step: gross gain, after-modifiers (Compliance / country / endorsement), then flat decays, then net rate. You can see exactly where the rate is coming from.
Bug fixes
Milestone reward numbers no longer re-animate from zero every time the campaign tab renders (resuming a save, switching tabs, reopening the War Room). They show their final value directly. The pulse highlight on a freshly-completed phase still fires.
Too Much Too Fast intel event no longer fires while intel is sitting at cap. The rate-of-change check was looking at gross gain before the cap clamp, so it would fire even when you'd gained zero actual intel for minutes.
Intel hover-popover no longer shows a phantom 'Producer over cap' drain when intel ops are locked. After the Too Much Too Fast 'Go quiet' choice, staff rows showed their full rate AND a red drain that cancelled them out. Now hidden during the lock; just the 'Laying low' timer.
Press Secretary and other chained staff now stay available at their unlock tier even after firing the prerequisite. The chain only describes hiring order; it shouldn't gate anything once you've reached the right tier.
Operations panel's affordability check now uses the same cost the activity actually deducts. The country-cost-multiplier mismatch could turn the cost line red while you actually had enough funds, or auto-pause an activity one tick after toggling it on.
Toggling Sell Secrets, Plant a Story, Voter Profiling, or Controlled Narrative no longer false-fires "Cannot afford" when you have the intel. The toggle's resource check was forgetting to look at intel.
Funds and Votes click buttons no longer drift out of vertical alignment when their flavor captions wrap differently.
Sunday Show Prep no longer pays you supporters AND charges you supporters at the same time. Dropped the supporter benefit; added a small reputation gain to match peer media operations.
Click button +N payout labels (the green/blue popup off the Funds and Votes buttons) are visible again on systems with reduced-motion enabled. They were being rendered and removed in the same frame because a global CSS rule shortens animations to 0.01ms; the button now shows them statically for ~700ms instead.
Resource bar hover popovers now show every source and drain. Audit caught nine missing rows (Donor Cultivation's donor-income bonus, synergy favor trickle, achievement-amplified party bonuses, activity-bonus mults on per-activity rows, intel staff-XP reconciliation, party XP gain/drain, expected scandal rep hit, at-favor-cap status, and a dormant funds slow-burn). The total per second on each resource now matches what the game actually applies.
New content
Media Spokesperson - new T8 staff hire whose only job is generating Media Attention. One hire holds you in the Local media band; stack for Regional/National/Viral. No other bonuses - they exist to manage the media bar.
Media indicator and modal now show a per-staff breakdown. Hover the media bar to see each generating staff, lobby boost when active, total generation, decay, and net change. Flavor text also stays stable instead of re-picking every tick.
More balance
Damage Control (Spin Doctor's scandal mitigation) rep cost no longer scales with tier. It was 2 rep at T1, 556 at T12 - over the 300 cap, so it was unusable past mid-game. Now flat at 30 rep across all tiers, matching the 30-heat drop dollar for dollar.
Four new operations that produce funds or supporters at the cost of raising a bounded resource (scandal heat or media attention). Foreign Donors (T7, funds + heat). Launch Meme Coin (T8, funds + media). Social Media War (T8, supporters + media). Deepfakes (T9, requires Fixer, supporters + heat). The bounded resource going up is the cost - high heat triggers more scandals, high media amplifies events and scandal risk. Risk-now-pay-later operations.
Media-attention contributions from operations no longer scale with tier. Was scaled by pow(tier, 0.7), making T8 contributions 4.3x the authored value and putting balance way off. Authored values are now the actual per-tick rates.
Balance
Reputation gain and cost on operations are now flat at every tier. The hidden tier multiplier was making early-tier rep gain ~1/10th of the authored rate and high-tier rep costs drain the whole range in seconds. Authored numbers are now the actual per-second rates. Ramp, synergy, and achievement bonuses still apply.
Favor gain and cost on operations also no longer scale with tier — same bug, same fix. Dark Money Laundry was draining 100+ favors per second at high tier against a 5-favor cap.
Dark Money Laundry favor cost dropped 100x to match the documented design (0.5 -> 0.005 per second). Sustainable for several minutes at default favor trickle, indefinitely at max-stack favor production.
Lobbyist fund generation halved (40 -> 20 base output). The Bundler fund generation halved (80 -> 40 base output) and pinned to one hire, mirroring the earlier PAC Liaison change. Stacked Bundlers were turning the late game into a single-staff runaway.
UX
Lobbyists now appear in the Scandal modal as a heat source row, so the n² scandal risk has a place to attribute itself.
Lobbyist staff card shows the favor drain rate next to the use-favors toggle, even when the toggle is off, so the cost is visible before flipping.
Favor breakdown popover now shows drains. Lobbyist favor drain and active activity favor costs appear as drain rows; the displayed rate per second nets out drains. When favors are net-draining, a "Time until favors run out" line shows runway.
Favor rate stays visible at zero and negative net (was hidden when not gaining).
Staff cap hover now lists lobby-group org-capacity contributions alongside managers and upgrades, so the cap math is fully attributed.
Staff panel has a resource filter row matching Operations: filter the staff list down to producers of a specific resource.
Lobby allocation has typed-input boxes alongside the sliders and a running total indicator that turns green at exactly 100. Bars are weights (proportional, not literal percentages); when they sum to 100 each weight is also a percentage.
Shadow Advisor description no longer claims to unlock secret event chains (there's no such system). Description now matches the bonuses the staff actually grants.
v0.8.4
UX
There is a title screen now. Every launch opens on Continue / New Game / Load Game / Settings / Quit before dropping you into the campaign. If a save was mid-election when you closed, you still resume right back into the result. Continue shows the active slot's office and tier. Footer has a Discord link.
Settings now persist across save slots, resets, and new games. Theme, keybindings, accessibility, dyslexia font, font size, locale, the 'I have seen this tip' flags, telemetry consent, and the telemetry ID all live in one global place outside the per-slot save. Switching slots no longer wipes your theme. Starting a new game keeps your keybindings. Auto-buy queues stay per-slot since those are gameplay strategy.
Click buttons no longer reserve invisible space for the MAX label. The space at the trailing edge of each click button (held in case the armed-flavor text needed to fit) was wide enough to wrap the row to two lines on common laptop widths. The label is gone. Reaching armed state shows a colored glow on the button instead, and committing pops the payout amount up off the button as a floater.
Synergy handbook has a By Staff sort. Lets you scan alphabetically and see which staff combinations you have not unlocked yet. Future-tier staff are masked as ??? so the sort does not spoil who is coming. Bonus, ship name, and flavor still stay hidden until you actually pair them.
Title menu cards are wider so longer office names fit on one line.
Patch notes modal now stays a fixed size with the notes scrolling inside. Used to grow with content. Scrollbar is visible at rest so Steam Deck players can see there is more to read.
Bug fixes
Announce phase reputation no longer scales with tier. The kickoff roll was multiplying the reputation reward by the tier multiplier, the same way it scales funds and votes. Reputation has a fixed budget at plus or minus 300 across the whole game. A forgettable announce at Tier 7 was costing 176 reputation. At Tier 12 it would clamp out the entire range in one outcome. Funds and votes still scale; reputation is now linear.
Operations Auto-stop at full ramp toggle now lives on Decays activities, where it actually matters. The toggle was on Ramps activities, where peak holds forever and there is nothing to escape. Decays activities (which slide back if you leave them on past the peak window) had no toggle even though they were the whole reason it exists. The toggle now also fires correctly: it flips the activity off the moment the antiRamp threshold is crossed, just before diminishing returns kicks in.
Deleting your active save slot no longer leaves the game in a half-rendered state. Used to wipe in-memory state and dump you into the campaign shell with nothing to render. Now sends you back to the title screen and the slot you deleted offers New Game so you can start over on the same slot.
Deleting an active save and then loading another slot no longer resurrects the deleted save as a fresh empty save. The slot-switch was checkpointing the in-memory state to the old active slot before switching, which on a just-deleted slot meant writing fresh defaults right back to localStorage.
Deleting a save from inside the title screen Load Game panel keeps the panel open. Used to close back to the title, which made it awkward to immediately pick a different slot or start a new game.
The keyboard tip on the title screen stays dismissed across reload. The persistence path was writing intermediate state to localStorage during a save load and clobbering the dismiss flag.
Patch notes modal no longer pops up over the Load Game screen mid-pick when you import a save with a different version. Waits until you are actually in the game.
v0.8.3-a
Internal
Patch notes for v0.8.3 read better now. The first cut sounded like the release manager wrote them. Re-done in the actual voice. Scroll down for the v0.8.3 entry to see what shipped.
v0.8.3
Bug fixes
Steam Deck players can see the scrollbar on the resources column now. Used to be transparent until you hovered. The Deck moves the trackpad like a mouse but does not really hover, so the column looked like there was nothing to scroll. Visible at rest on touch and trackpad now. Mice still get the polite auto-hide.
UX
Reference page is a popover now and reads like prose. Used to be a full-screen takeover with three labeled sections per entry that read like a textbook. Each entry is now one paragraph plus a closer.
Reference page accuracy pass. While we were in there, every entry got re-verified against the actual code. About a dozen claims were stale or wrong. Favors cap is 5 not 10. Donor levels do not raise the fund cap. Dossier is a Top-Tier-only system driven by Opposition Researcher. Prestige unlocks only on a presidential win. Endorsements are not permanent unlocks. The welcome-back paragraph still mentioned offline progress that has not existed since MVP2. All cleaned up.
Font size moved up a level. Was buried in Accessibility. Also lives in Settings to Display now.
Operations cards now tell you which ones decay. Some operations ramp to peak and stay there. Others slide back if you leave them on too long. There was no way to know which without flipping the operation on. Each card has a blue Ramps badge and an orange Decays badge if it applies. The Auto-stop toggle has visible context now.
New Machine upgrade: Muscle Memory. Holding a click button used to fire once at max and stop, even though you were still pressing. The upgrade (25 PC) makes the held button auto-fire at 8x and re-charge while you hold, chaining max fires. Without the upgrade the held button still single-shots at the end of the armed window.
Balance
Tier-locked event fund costs re-swept at T3, T6, T7, T8. The previous audit said these tiers were tier-appropriate. They were not. T3 events were spending $50 against a $76,000 fund cap. About 15 events got bumped into the same range T4 / T5 / T9+ were originally authored at. Endless Road Project's pressure-the-contractor went from -$100 to -$3000. Cool Eagle's no-vote fruit basket went from +$8000 to +$40000.
Donor Database (wallet1) effect swap. The old version cut donor activation costs by 15%, which saved about one favor twice a campaign. New effect: +15% donor fund output. Stacks with Money Machine for 40% combined.
v0.8.2
Bug fixes
Starting-bonus achievements now actually pay out when you start a fresh campaign. The achievements that grant starting rep or intel (comeback_kid, intel_first_reveal, field_operative_hire) were paying out on tier advances but silently doing nothing on prestige resets, NG+, and New Game on an empty slot. Three separate code paths needed to know about the bonus. Now they all share one helper. The Steam-to-save merge applies the bonus too, so unlocking an achievement on another device through Cloud actually credits the next time you open the game.
UX
Endorsement event has new copy when only one offer comes in. The standard 'Time to Pick a Side' framing was firing even on tiers where only the fallback (Pothole Lobby etc.) qualified, which read as the UI being thin instead of the field being quiet. Now reads 'Mostly Crickets. You worked the phones. Most of the local power players are sitting this cycle out. {name} is the only one to call back.'
v0.8.1
Bug fixes
Synergy slots no longer let you assign the same staff member twice. The slot-card picker filtered out staff already in other slots, but the Pair Handbook's quick-assign button skipped that check. Fixed in both places.
War-room advisor stopped telling you to shore up a factor that is already at its cap. Reputation contribution caps at 200 rep. Players past that saw 'Reputation is your weakest factor' anyway because the panel was comparing raw values across factors with different caps. Now compares headroom-to-cap and only calls out factors with room to grow.
Click buttons no longer reflow to a top/bottom stack at full charge. Holding both buttons to full charge made the projected payout widen enough to trip the row's wrap. The payout digits sit in a fixed-width slot now. The row only wraps as a graceful fallback on very narrow viewports.
Event choices that grant or drain intel actually show it now. The inline tag row and the Intel resource bar were both ignoring intel changes from events, so you saw funds/rep/votes move but had no indication intel was changing. Both fixed.
Field Organizer's unlock flavor stopped saying 'you lost.' Field Organizer unlocks at the start of T3, not after a loss. Reframed to 'you are the underdog.'
UX
New per-activity Auto-stop at full ramp toggle. Ramp-bearing activities now have a small switch that flips them off the moment ramp crosses threshold (after one tick at full multiplier). Useful for slot rotation and for skipping the anti-ramp diminishing-returns phase. A toast confirms the auto-stop.
Operations nav pulses when you have an open slot. Easy to forget you have room for another op. The tab lights up whenever active count is below slot cap and you are not currently on the screen.
Balance
Community Newsletter's rep generation cut in half. Newsletter was the dominant rep faucet at T2-T3 for a 2-fund cost. Now a balanced hybrid pick. Supporters benefit and ramp shape unchanged.
Dale's Attack Ad (T3): the 'lean into the yearbook photo' option is a real choice now. The counter-ad option used to strictly dominate. Lean-in now grants more votes and more intel. Still asymmetric, but actually competitive when you are cash-strapped or chasing intel reveals.
v0.8.0-c
Bug fixes
Closing the window no longer leaves Steam stuck on Running. The previous fixes made the game launch, but the exit path was not shutting down cleanly because the Steam SDK bindings keep a background timer alive. Forced a clean process exit after 500ms in the window-close handler. Steam's library entry refreshes within a second of closing now, like every other game.
v0.8.0-b
Bug fixes
Linux launch via Steam works on Wayland desktops now. The 0.8.0-a hotfix picked up two of the three causes. The third was Chromium's Wayland renderer failing to talk to its main process inside Steam's Linux runtime container. Forced the X11 backend, which routes through XWayland. Same pattern Discord, Slack, and most Steam-distributed Electron games use.
v0.8.0-a
Bug fixes
Linux Steam launch no longer hangs with no window. Two stacked issues. Electron's sandbox could not fork child processes under Steam's userland install. The production build's asset paths were absolute when they needed to be relative. Both fixed. The window opens as expected now.
v0.8.0
Steam Playtest
Vote For Me opens for Steam Playtest. Twelve offices from Dog Catcher to President. The campaign begins.