My game has one verb: you name a price.
That's it. O'BLOCK is a sneaker-flipping game set on a spoof of early-2010s Chicago. Buying and selling are the same move from opposite sides of the table. No combat, no crafting. So the haggling had to carry the whole game, and "pick a random number, say higher/lower" gets old in about four minutes.
Here's what the buyers actually do under the hood (Rust, about 700 lines).
Everyone has a hidden number
Each person gets a limit: the most they'll pay, or the least they'll take. It comes from the pair's going rate, then gets pushed around by how sharp they are, how greedy, how picky, their mood today, and your reputation with them.
Then they say a number out loud. It's never the limit. A buyer's opening ask sits 15 to 50% above it, depending on greed.
They tell you how close you are, sort of
Every offer that doesn't close gets a reply: a "heat" value plus a line in that character's voice. "Philosophically, no." "Now you're thinking." "Dad would say no. So, no."
Run out their patience (a number per person, stretched by good mood) and they either counter or walk.
Then I made them lie
This is where it got fun. Some buyers play by a rule:
- Mirror: tells you how warm your previous offer was. Always one step behind.
- Fog: only ever says Close, Warm or Cold. No detail.
- Liar: tells it backwards. Close sounds cold, cold sounds close.
- Haggler: their number moves 5% against you every time you speak. Talk less.
- Drifter: their number does a mean-reverting random walk (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, yes really) toward a "home" that your own offers pull on. Lowball him and his home sinks. The noise is real, so you have to read the trend, not the last tell.
The Drifter is the one I'm proudest of. He's also the most annoying person in the game, which feels correct.
Fakes
If you're buying and the pair is fake, the seller's limit quietly drops to 55-80% of the real value. They're cheap because they know. The game never tells you it's fake. You get a couple of tells about the pair ("Box label font is off." "Smells like glue and plastic.") and a price that feels a bit too easy.
That's the tell you can't see, only smell.
Why bother
Because with one verb, the depth has to be in the people. Every deal is a tiny poker hand against someone with a personality, a mood and a rule you have to figure out.
You start with a few hundred bucks in "Parkway Gardenz" and the endgame is selling to Elon Tusk, Jeff Bozos and Mark Zuckerbird.
It's free on Steam October 20 (English, 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어). If this sounds like your kind of dumb, a wishlist helps a ton: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5357680/?utm_source=devto
Top comments (0)