Balatro developer Local Thunk has shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog, revealing an intriguing approach to game design. Throughout the development of Balatro, Local Thunk consciously avoided playing roguelike games, except for one notable exception. As of December 2021, he decided not to play any more 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 made an exception and played Slay the Spire. He remarked, "Holy shit, now **that** is a game." His initial intention was to study the game's controller implementation due to some difficulties he was facing, but he ended up getting engrossed in the gameplay. He expressed relief at having avoided it until then, as he feared it might have influenced his design choices too heavily.
Local Thunk's blog post provides numerous fascinating insights into the development process. For instance, he mentioned that the working folder for Balatro 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 shared details about several scrapped features, including:
- "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"
Local Thunk also recounted how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers, a decision influenced by a miscommunication with his publisher, Playstack. He initially mentioned 120 Jokers in a meeting, but a subsequent meeting referenced 150 Jokers. Whether it was a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, Local Thunk decided that 150 was a better number and added 30 more Jokers to the game.
Lastly, Local Thunk shared the origin story of his developer handle, "Local Thunk." The name stems from a programming joke. His partner, who was learning to code in R, humorously suggested naming variables "thunk." Combined with the Lua programming language's use of the "local" keyword, "local thunk" was born.
For those interested in more details about Balatro's development, Local Thunk's full blog post can be found [here](link to the blog). At IGN, we highly appreciate 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."
