Local Thunk, the developer behind the popular game Balatro, recently shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a surprising revelation, he admitted to not playing any roguelike games during Balatro's development, with one notable exception.
Starting in December 2021, Local Thunk made a deliberate choice to avoid roguelike games, including deckbuilders, which he had never played before. He explained, "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, he broke this rule once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He described his reaction as, "Holy shit, now that is a game." Initially, he played it to study its controller implementation for card games, but he quickly became engrossed in the game. He expressed relief at having waited to play it, saying, "Thank goodness I avoided playing it until now because I surely would have just copied their incredible design (intentionally or subconsciously)."
Local Thunk's blog post is filled with fascinating insights into Balatro's development. He revealed that the game's working folder was originally named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout development. The working title for much of the project was "Joker Poker."
He also shared details about scrapped features, including:
- A version where the only way to upgrade anything was to upgrade cards in a pseudo-shop, similar to Super Auto Pets, where cards could be upgraded multiple times.
- A separate currency for rerolls outside of the main currency.
- A 'golden seal' that would return a card to the player's hand after it had been played if they skipped all blinds.
An amusing anecdote explained how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk had a meeting with the publisher, Playstack, in October 2023, where he mentioned having "120 Jokers." In a subsequent meeting, someone referenced "150 Jokers." Unsure whether he had misspoken or if there was a misunderstanding, he decided that 150 was a better number and added 30 more Jokers to the game.
Lastly, Local Thunk shared the origin of his developer handle, "Local Thunk." It stemmed from a conversation with his partner, who was learning to code in R. She humorously suggested naming variables "thunk." Since variables in Lua are sometimes declared with the "local" keyword, "local thunk" was born.
For those interested in more details about Balatro's development, Local Thunk's full blog post is available online. 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."
