by Balatro developer Local Thunk has published an extensive history of the development of the game on his personal blog, in which he admits that he did not play a rogue games at all during the development of Balatro … except one.
In his development time line, the anonymous developer says from December 2021, he made a conscious attempt not to play roguelike games from that moment.
“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, they release and make money is not so naive exploring roguelike design (and especially deckbuilder design, because I had never played of existing games. Games. “
However, a year and a half later, the local Thunk broke their rule exactly once. He downloaded the striker. “Holy Shit,” he wrote. “now That Is a game. “
He explains further to explain why he started playing in the first place: “I did this because I had some problems in my implementation of the controller and I wanted to see how they treated controller -inputs for a card game, but I was finally sucked up. I avoided God so far because I would certainly have copied their incredible design).”
The post-mort by Local Thunk is full of interesting insights. First of all, he explains that in the development he called the Map Production Working early in development for Balatro “Cardgame” and then just … never changed. He also reveals that the working title for the game was ‘Joker Poker’ for a large part of his development.
Local Thunk also offered a number of insights into deleted functions, including:
- “A version where the only way to upgrade something is to upgrade the cards in your deck in a kind of pseudo-shop, and those cards can be upgraded several times (think as superauto house animals, pets have different XP/levels in combination, the same idea)” “”
- “A separate currency for resubmits outside %1quot;
- “A ‘golden seal’ that must be added to playing cards when you skip all the blinds that that card returns to the hand after it has been played”
We were also treated to an anecdote about how Balatro landed on 150 Jokers. It was apparently the result of miscommunication:
‘I also had a meeting with PlayStack [the publisher] This month [October 2023] Where I described the last content in the game, including ‘120 Jokers’, “wrote Local Thunk.” Later that week I had a meeting with them, and someone called something about 150 jokers. I could not remember if I accidentally said that I would make 150 or that they had heard me wrong, but anyway, I thought 150 was a much better number, so I added 30 Jokers to the plan. “
The local Thunk finally took care of the story of the deep origin of the name … Local Thunk. tl; dr, it’s a programming joke:
“At that time my partner learned in R coding and she asked me:” What do you call your variables? ” I went to rage about the housing, with the help of descriptive words, underlines, etc. She waits until I am ready and says: “I call mine Thunk.”
“The way in which variables are explained in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, so the local Thunk was born! I would choose this name for a while, but this is the moment I looked back when I was finally ready to make a developer online.”
There is much more to read about making Balatro in the blog of the local Thunk, which can be found here. Unnecessary to say that we love Balatro at IGN, give it a 9/10 and call it “a deck builder of endlessly satisfying proportions, it is the kind of pleasure that threatens to derail entire weekend plans while you stay wake up far too late in the eyes of a jar that you are seduced for again.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her on bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Do you have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
