Local Thunk Avoided Roguelikes in Balatro Development, Except Slay the Spire

Balatro developer Local Thunk has shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a candid revelation, he disclosed that he deliberately avoided playing other roguelike games during Balatro's development, with one notable exception. As of December 2021, Local Thunk made a conscious decision to steer clear of roguelike games to maintain the joy of exploring new design concepts independently.

"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," he explained.

However, a year and a half later, Local Thunk broke his rule once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He was initially drawn to it to study controller implementations for card games but found himself captivated by the game. "Holy shit," he wrote. "now **that** is a game." He was grateful for delaying his experience with it, as he believed it might have influenced his design choices too heavily.

Local Thunk's post-mortem offers fascinating insights into the development process. He revealed 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 the game ended up with 150 Jokers, a result of a miscommunication with his publisher, Playstack. Initially, he mentioned having 120 Jokers, but a subsequent conversation led to the number being misheard or misremembered as 150. Deciding that 150 was a better fit, he added 30 more Jokers to the game.

The origin of his developer name, Local Thunk, stems from a programming joke shared with his partner, who was learning to code in R. She humorously suggested naming variables "thunk," and Local Thunk was born from combining this with the Lua programming language's "local" keyword.

For those interested in more details, Local Thunk's full blog post is available for reading. 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."