Balatro developer Local Thunk has published the extensive history of the game’s development on his personal blog. He admits that he didn’t play any rogue games at all during Balatro’s development… except for one.
The anonymous developer says in his development timeline that he made a conscious effort to avoid playing any more guelike games from that point onwards.
“I’m clarifying the crystals here and saying that it wasn’t because I thought this would lead to a better game. This is my hobby of making games and not making money from them. It brought me tighter games, but it would have beaten the purpose of what I like to make games.”
But a year and a half later, the local sank broke their rules only once. He downloaded Slay the Spire. “Holy shit,” he wrote. “now that It’s a game. ”
He continues to explain why he first started playing. “I did this because I had some issues with the controller implementation, and I wanted to see how they handled the controller input in the card game, but I avoided it until now because I only copied their incredible design (intentionally or potentially).”
Local Thunk’s postmote is full of interesting insights. One explains that early in development, he named the production working folder for Balatro “Cardgame” but didn’t change it. He also makes clear that the game’s working title is “Joker Poker” throughout much of its development.
The local sank also provided plenty of insight into discarded features, including:
- “The only way to upgrade something is to upgrade cards in a kind of pseudo shop, and those cards can be upgraded multiple times (like Super Autopet, pets have different XP/levels when combined).”
- “Individual currency for rerolls other than %1quot.
- “The “Golden Seal” is added to the card when you skip all blinds that return that card after it has been played.”
It was also addressed anecdotes about how Baratoro landed in 150 Jokers. It was clearly a result of misunderstanding:
“This month (October 2023) we also had a meeting with PlayStack (publisher), where we discussed the final content of the game, including ‘120 Jokers,'” writes Local Thunk. “Later that week I had another meeting with them and someone mentioned something about the 150 Jokers. I couldn’t remember if I accidentally said I was going to make 150 people or if they misunderstood me, but anyway, I thought 150 people were a much better number, so I added 30 Jokers to my plan.”
Finally, the local sank provided a story of the deep origin of the name… the local sank. tl;dr, that’s a programming joke:
“My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me, ‘How do you name a variable?’ I used descriptive words, underscores and more about casing.
“The way variables are declared in LUA is (sometimes) a local keyword, so local thunks are born! I haven’t selected this name for quite some time, but this is the moment when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online.”
There is much to read about creating Baratoro on my local Sank blog. This is here. Needless to say, we love Passthecontroller’s Baratoro, giving 9/10 and “a deck builder with endlessly satisfying proportions, and it’s a kind of fun that threatens to derail your entire weekend plan as you keep waking up as you stare intently into Jester’s eyes seducing another run.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at Passthecontroller. You can find her posts at Bluesky @Duckvalentine.bsky.social. Do you have any tips for the story? Send to [email protected].
