The team signs off, the rounds get shorter, and the office starts floating

The team signs off.

Booking a sprint used to be one big number arriving at once. Now it reads like a timesheet going round the office. The hours from your cards stay where they are, and the cards you played give a short nod with a gold rim. Then every colleague who adds something takes a turn, in the order of your team: their badge steps forward, a slip pops up above their effect with the extra hours, the extra rate or a multiplier in gold, and the total counts up from there. You see exactly who earned what, and which colleague is worth the seat. A lot was tried before this: labels flying to the scoreboard, stamps, a little stack of paper, a sheen across the cards. All of it was either too busy or too cute. The quiet version won.

The first version of that moment worked, but it felt tinny next to the rest of the game. The slips popped up in a frame or two and bounced past their own size, the badge jumped forward without any transition, and its gold rim was simply on and then off. Now the slip glides up as it appears, holds for a moment and drifts away as it fades. The badge steps forward and settles back, its rim fades in and out, the hours and rate count across the whole turn of each colleague, and the last slip no longer falls half off the edge of a phone. Same order, same numbers, just smooth.

Shorter rounds, the same weight.

After the first round you no longer start again at the blueprint. Round two starts at phase two and has six phases, round three starts at phase three and has five, and from round four you play the last three. The targets per phase stay exactly as hard, so the pressure is the same, there is just less filler on the way to it. The later rounds also got their own phase names, for the rollout, the migration and the change request. Because there is less time to build a new team, the knowledge transfer is more generous: after round one you may take two colleagues along, after round two three, and so on. One small fix came along: the hours box was nearly unreadable in the light Corporate Memphis theme, and now takes its colour from the theme.

Progress you can see.

Every firm on the selection screen now shows four medals, one for each partner tier you have completed with it. The personnel file counts each group, like 24 of 66 colleagues. And unlocks that build up over several runs say where you stand, like 7 of 10.

The office floats.

The title screen was a logo and some buttons. Now office supplies drift up behind it, cut out of paper in the colours of your theme, each with a little shadow. There is a coffee mug that says KICK-OFF, a floppy called BACKUP_v3, a spreadsheet full of #REF!, a planning whose last bar keeps slipping, a calendar where the go-live moves, a laptop stuck on update 1 of 47, a clock frozen at 17:59, ticket 4711, a printer with a paper jam, a rubber duck, and more. Once in a while a golden parachute drifts the other way, down. On a large screen the title also got a new layout: the brand big in the middle, a new project and the daily challenge right below it, and everything else as one row of lighter buttons.

The objects took a few rounds. First too busy, then fewer but bigger, then spread evenly across the screen instead of in clumps, and in the end a little softer, so they never compete with the text you need to read. On a real Steam Deck they could still pile up into a thick band after going back and forth between screens. Two small mistakes together: objects that had floated away were never cleaned up, and coming back to the title screen started all of them again at once. Both are fixed, and there is now a hard limit: at most twelve at a time on a large screen, seven on a phone.

Every screen at 1280 by 800, again.

The check that photographs every screen at the size of a Steam Deck now runs as the desktop version, the one that actually runs on a Deck, and in both languages. It found a few things. The trophies on the title screen now sit in four neat columns, so the screen fits without a scrollbar. The timeline shows all seven phases instead of six and a half. On the playing field the phase and the target no longer touch. The windows with the combinations and the knowledge transfer fit, even with the longer Dutch texts. And the archive no longer says "1 documents".

Arrows that go where you point.

On a Steam Deck you move through the game with the d-pad, and it did not always go where you expected. In the settings, pressing down from the language skipped the brightness row entirely and landed on the display buttons. The reason: the game measured from the middle of one button to the middle of the next. The brightness buttons are narrow and sit a little to the left, so the wide display button further down happened to be "more straight below". Elsewhere you could slide into the other column because a button there stood half next to you.

Now the game first looks at what lies straight in the direction you press, and of that picks the nearest, measured from edge to edge, the way the arrows on a TV menu work. The check that photographs every screen at Steam Deck size now also works out where every arrow on every screen leads, and complains if anything can only be reached with a mouse. Everything can be reached, in both languages.

One card on the playing field also kept twitching every time you picked another card. It looked like a mouse was resting on it, and in a way one was. A Steam Deck tells the browser it has a mouse, so cards lift a little when the pointer is over them. The invisible pointer was parked on that card, and every pick redraws the hand, so that card lifted again and again. While you play with buttons or arrow keys, nothing reacts to the pointer any more, until you actually move it.

And the knowledge transfer, the window between two rounds, still showed a scrollbar on the Deck with a full team and a handful of certifications. Your cash now sits next to the heading instead of under it, the colleague cards are a little flatter, and it all fits. If it ever does not, with an extra-large team, only the list scrolls and the heading and the Continue button stay put.

The main menu, on a phone.

On a phone with a few trophies to your name, the main menu needed scrolling before you could even start, and with a project to resume it was worse. The phone now gets the same idea as the large screen: a new project and the daily challenge stay big, and the custom seed, personnel file, archive, how it works and settings become small, light buttons, usually three to a row. The logo shrinks a little once trophies appear below it, and the trophy rows sit closer together. It fits on every phone size we tried, in English and in Dutch.

The K, properly.

Zoom far into the logo and you would find a tiny step where the lower stroke of the loop meets the stem of the K, three or four pixels wide. It is gone: the edge now runs straight into the stem. In the large logo of the game that step was easy to see once you knew where to look. In the icon, the one on this site too, it was less than a pixel, and it was straightened all the same.