Balatro developer Local Thunk has shared a comprehensive account of the game's development journey on his personal blog, revealing a unique approach to game design. In a surprising admission, Local Thunk disclosed that he refrained from playing any roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with one notable exception.
Starting in December 2021, Local Thunk consciously avoided other roguelike games. 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 into development, Local Thunk broke his rule once by playing Slay the Spire. He described his reaction as, "Holy shit, now **that** is a game." Initially, he played it to study controller implementation for card games but found himself deeply engaged. He remarked, "Thank goodness I avoided playing it until now because I surely would have just copied their incredible design (intentionally or subconsciously)."
Local Thunk's detailed post-mortem provides fascinating insights into the game's development. Early on, he named the project folder "CardGame" and stuck with it throughout development. The working title for the game was "Joker Poker." He also shared insights into several features that were considered but ultimately scrapped, such as:
- "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 playing cards when you skip all blinds that returns that card to hand after it has been played"
An interesting anecdote revealed how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk explained a miscommunication with the publisher, Playstack, during a meeting in October 2023: "I also had a meeting with Playstack [the publisher] this month [October 2023] where I described to them the final content in the game, including ‘120 Jokers’. Later that week I had another meeting with them, and someone mentioned something about 150 Jokers. I couldn’t remember if I accidentally said I was going to make 150 or if they misheard me, but either way I thought that 150 was a much better number so I added 30 more Jokers to the plan."
Lastly, Local Thunk shared the origin of his developer name, which stemmed from a programming joke. He recounted, "My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me 'How do you name your variables?' I went on some rant about casing, using descriptive words, underscores, etc. She waits until I am finished and says 'I like to call mine thunk'. I thought that was just about the funniest thing 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."
For those interested in diving deeper into the making of Balatro, Local Thunk's blog offers a wealth of information. 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."
