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

Balatro developer, known as Local Thunk, has recently shared a detailed account of the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a candid revelation, Local Thunk admits to having consciously avoided playing other roguelike games during the development of Balatro, except for one notable exception. As of December 2021, he decided to stop playing roguelike games to preserve the joy of exploring roguelike and deckbuilder design on his own terms.

"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 into development, Local Thunk broke his own rule once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. His reaction was immediate and strong: "Holy shit," he wrote, "now **that** is a game." His initial reason for playing was to study controller implementation for card games, but he ended up getting deeply immersed in the game. He expressed gratitude for having avoided it until then, noting, "Thank goodness I avoided playing it until now because I surely would have just copied their incredible design (intentionally or subconsciously)."

Local Thunk's post-mortem is rich with insights into the development process. For instance, he revealed that the working folder for Balatro was initially named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout development. The game's working title during much of its development was "Joker Poker."

He also shared details about scrapped features, including:

• A version where the only way to upgrade anything was to upgrade cards in the deck in a sort of pseudo-shop, with cards upgradable multiple times, similar to Super Auto Pets.
• A separate currency for rerolls outside of the main currency.
• A ‘golden seal’ feature for playing cards, added when skipping all blinds, which would return the card to the hand after being played.

Local Thunk also recounted how the game ended up with 150 Jokers due to a miscommunication with his publisher, Playstack. Initially mentioning 120 Jokers, a subsequent meeting mentioned 150, leading him to decide that 150 was a better number and adding 30 more Jokers to the game.

The origin of the developer's pseudonym, Local Thunk, was also disclosed. It stems from a programming joke shared with his partner, who was learning to code in R. When asked about naming variables, Local Thunk went on a rant about best practices, only for his partner to humorously suggest naming hers "thunk." This led to the creation of "local thunk," a play on Lua's variable declaration syntax.

For those interested in more details about Balatro's development, Local Thunk's blog provides an in-depth look. IGN has also praised Balatro, giving 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."