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, revealing an intriguing aspect of his creative process: he consciously avoided playing roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with one notable exception. As of December 2021, Local Thunk decided to steer clear of roguelike games, not for the sake of creating a superior game, but to preserve the joy of exploration and discovery inherent in game development for him.

"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 self-imposed rule once by playing Slay the Spire. His reaction was profound: "Holy shit," he wrote, "now **that** is a game." Initially, he downloaded it to examine its controller implementation for card games, but ended up getting deeply engrossed. He expressed gratitude for delaying his experience with Slay the Spire until then, as it prevented him from potentially copying its design, either intentionally or subconsciously.

Local Thunk's post-mortem is rich with insights, including the revelation that the working folder for Balatro was simply named "CardGame" throughout development, and the game's working title was "Joker Poker." He also discussed several scrapped features, 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"

He also shared an amusing anecdote about how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers, which stemmed from a miscommunication with his publisher, Playstack. Initially planning for 120 Jokers, a subsequent meeting led to a misunderstanding, resulting in the decision to increase the number to 150, which Local Thunk ultimately deemed a better fit.

Finally, Local Thunk delved into the origin of his developer pseudonym, "Local Thunk." It originated from a humorous exchange with his partner about variable naming in programming. His partner's playful suggestion of "thunk" as a variable name, combined with the Lua programming language's use of the "local" keyword, inspired the name.

For more fascinating details about the development of Balatro, you can visit Local Thunk's blog. 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."