Hey. Sten here.
I will start with the DEMO update. Unfortunately, it has been delayed as STEAM is still reviewing it. We had a bit of back-and-forth. Fingers crossed for next week.
This week, let's talk about negotiations. It is kinda a breakthrough feature of the game, looks like...
In many niche games like ours, it usually means a shop slider, a discount perk, or a button where you click "pay less" and the merchant becomes sad for three seconds. All scripted, but not in Hire.
We wanted the worse version. The version where you have to open your mouth (stretch your fingers) and try hard.
In Hire, when somebody comes to your office with work with cash, the first problem is not the monster, the cave, or the road. The first problem is the person sitting in front of you. They want the job done. They also want to pay as little as possible, because this is how people with money stay people with money, right?
Deep inside under the hood NPC's know what the goal and the realistic budget is, but you don't. They have an opening offer. They have a true maximum budget, but sometimes not really, it depends... They have urgency. They may already have tried other guilds and been refused. They may be calm, panicked, proud, greedy, generous or very generous, deceitful, broke, wealthy, insulted, or desperate enough to accept a bad deal just to get things moving.
You do not see all of that, but you can get some clues. You see the face, the way they speak and your own read of the situation. Then you type. Ask for more or you take whatever. You push on the deadline. Be polite. Be rude. Waste their time. Walk away. Sometimes they should walk away first.
The second half is meaner. If you sign the contract, now you must hire the people who will actually risk their bones and do the job for you. The whole table flips. The person with the job was the buyer, so lower price was good for them. The hero is selling his/her labor and time now, and you are the buyer and you are not in this business to make loses.
So a hero can argue in a way that makes sense. Something like "The fight may be modest, but you want me gone for seventy days, how about my wife and 5 kids?" Or the reverse: "The road is short, but that place is a coffin, I'm too young (or too handsome) to die." Read the clues.
That last part is important. Negotiation is pressure. One side has money, deadlines, standing, past refusals, and memory of you. The other has fear, debt, prestige, ambition, and his/her own idea of what the road trip is worth.
After you do this many times, the idea becomes very simple. You should remember a negotiation because of what you tried, not because we wrote one clever line. Maybe you squeezed a panicked noble person too hard. Maybe you lied to a young hero and he came back with a limp. Maybe you saved money today and bought hatred for next month.
That is the fun part. Not "press haggle." Not "choose aggressive option." Just you, a bad contract, a person who can say no, and your treasury quietly bleeding in the corner.
More next Friday.
Sten.