"Balatro Devs: No Roguelikes Played, Except Slay the Spire"

Balatro's developer, known as Local Thunk, has shared an in-depth account of the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a surprising revelation, he admitted to not playing any roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with the exception of one notable instance.

Local Thunk made a deliberate decision in December 2021 to avoid playing other roguelike games, stating, "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 year and a half later, Local Thunk broke his rule just once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He described his reaction as, "Holy shit, now **that** is a game." His initial intent was to study Slay the Spire's controller implementation due to challenges he faced with his own, but he ended up getting deeply engrossed in the game. He noted, "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 is filled with fascinating insights into the development process. For instance, the game's working folder was initially named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout development. The game's working title was "Joker Poker" for much of its development phase.

He also discussed several scrapped features, including a version where the only way to upgrade was through a pseudo-shop system for cards, similar to Super Auto Pets; a separate currency for rerolls; and a 'golden seal' feature that would return a card to the player's hand after it was played if all blinds were skipped.

An interesting anecdote revealed how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk mentioned a meeting with Playstack, the game's publisher, where he initially discussed having 120 Jokers. A subsequent misunderstanding or miscommunication led to the number being bumped up to 150, which he decided was a better fit and thus added 30 more Jokers to the plan.

The origin of Local Thunk's developer name also stems from a humorous exchange with his partner, who was learning to code in R. When asked about naming variables, she jokingly suggested "thunk," which led to the creation of "local thunk" as a programming pun. Local Thunk later adopted this as his developer handle.

For those interested in diving deeper into the creation of Balatro, Local Thunk's full blog post is available for reading. IGN has praised Balatro, awarding it a 9/10 and describing it as "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."