Balatro developer Local Thunk has printed an in depth historical past of the game's improvement to his private weblog, by which he admits he didn't play any rogue-like video games in any respect during Balatro's improvement…besides one.
In his development timeline, the nameless developer says as of December 2021, he made a acutely aware effort to not play any more roguelike video games ranging from that time.
"I want to be crystal clear here and say that this was not because I thought it would result in a better game, this was because making games is my hobby, releasing them and making money from them is not, so naively exploring roguelike design (and especially deckbuilder design, since I had never played one before) was part of the fun for me. I wanted to make mistakes, I wanted to reinvent the wheel, I didn’t want to borrow tried-and-true designs from existing games. That likely would have resulted in a more tight game but it would have defeated the purpose of what I love about making games."
However, a 12 months and a half later, Local Thunk broke their rule precisely as soon as. He downloaded Slay the Spire. "Holy shit," he wrote. "now that is a game."
He goes on to clarify why he began taking part in in the first place: "I did this because I was having some troubles in my controller implementation and I wanted to see how they handled controller inputs for a card game but I ended up getting sucked in. Thank goodness I avoided playing it until now because I surely would have just copied their incredible design (intentionally or subconsciously)."
Local Thunk's post-mort is full of fascinating insights. For one, he explains that early on in improvement he named the manufacturing working folder for Balatro "CardGame" after which simply…by no means modified it. He additionally reveals that the working title for the game all through a lot of its improvement was "Joker Poker."
Local Thunk additionally offered a quantity of insights into scrapped options, together with:
- "a version where the only way to upgrade anything is to upgrade the cards in your deck in a sort of pseudo-shop, and those cards can be upgraded multiple times (think like Super Auto Pets, pets have different XP/levels when combined, same idea)"
- "a separate currency for rerolls outside of %1quot;
- "a ‘golden seal’ to be added to taking part in playing cards if you skip all blinds that returns that card handy after it has been performed"
We also got treated to an anecdote on how Balatro landed on 150 Jokers. It was apparently the result of a miscommunication:
"I additionally had a assembly with Playstack [the publisher] this month [October 2023] the place I described to them the remaining content material in the game, together with ‘120 Jokers’," Local Thunk wrote. "Later that week I had one other assembly with them, and somebody talked about one thing about 150 Jokers. I couldn’t keep in mind if I unintentionally mentioned I used to be going to make 150 or in the event that they misheard me, however both method I assumed that 150 was a a lot better quantity so I added 30 more Jokers to the plan."
Finally Local Thunk provided the deep origin story of the name…Local Thunk. tl;dr, it's a programming joke:
"My companion was studying to code in R at the time, and he or she requested me 'How do you title your variables?' I went on some rant about casing, utilizing descriptive phrases, underscores, and many others. She waits till I’m completed and says 'I prefer to call mine thunk'. I assumed that was nearly the funniest factor I had ever heard.
"The way variables are declared in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, thus local thunk was born! I wouldn’t choose this name for quite a while yet but this is the moment I looked back on when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online."
There's a lot more to examine the making of Balatro in Local Thunk's weblog, which can be found here. Needless to say, we love Balatro at IGN, giving it a 9/10 and calling it "A deck-builder of endlessly satisfying proportions, it's the sort of fun that threatens to derail whole weekend plans as you stay awake far too late staring into the eyes of a jester tempting you in for just one more run."
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].