Balatro developer, Local Thunk, recently shared a fascinating development history on their personal blog. Surprisingly, they admit to avoiding most rogue-likes during Balatro's creation—with one notable exception.
Their development timeline reveals a conscious decision, starting December 2021, to refrain from playing rogue-likes. Thunk explains this wasn't to improve the game, but rather a personal choice: game development is a hobby, not a business. Experimentation and reinventing the wheel, even at the cost of efficiency, were part of the fun. Borrowing established designs would have yielded a tighter game, but it would have sacrificed the joy of personal discovery.
However, a year and a half later, this self-imposed rule cracked. Thunk downloaded *Slay the Spire*. Their reaction? "Holy shit," they wrote, "now *that* is a game."The reason for this indulgence? Thunk was struggling with controller implementation and wanted to study Slay the Spire's approach to card game controls. However, they were immediately captivated. Thankfully, they avoided playing it earlier, acknowledging that it would have likely influenced their design, intentionally or not.
Thunk's post-mortem is packed with insightful anecdotes. For instance, the game's initial working folder was simply named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout much of development. The working title, "Joker Poker," also reveals an early stage of the project.
Several scrapped features are detailed, including:
- A system where card upgrades were the sole method of character progression, similar to Super Auto Pets.
- A separate currency for rerolls.
- A "golden seal" mechanic that returned played cards to the hand after skipping all blind draws.
The number of Jokers (150) is also explained as a result of a miscommunication during discussions with publisher Playstack. Thunk initially proposed 120, but a later conversation led to 150 being suggested, a number ultimately deemed superior.
Finally, the origin of the name "Local Thunk" is revealed as a programming joke stemming from a conversation with their partner learning R programming.
Thunk's blog post provides much more detail on Balatro's creation. IGN loved the final product, awarding it a 9/10 and praising it as "A deck-builder of endlessly satisfying proportions...the sort of fun that threatens to derail whole weekend plans..."
