During Balatro's development, Local Thunk didn't play any Roguelike games…except to kill the spire

Balatro developer Local Thunk has published a vast history of game development to his personal blog, admitting that he did not play any Rogue-like games at all during his development in Balatro…except one.

In his development timelineThe anonymous developer said that as of December 2021, he made a conscious effort to not start playing any Roguelike games from then on.

“I want to make it clear here that this is not because I think it will lead to better games, it is because making games is my hobby, releasing them and making money from them is not, so naively exploring Roguelikeike's design (especially Deckbuilder Design, especially Deckbuilder Design I've never played before, because I've never played one before) because I want to try it out with ME. This may lead to more intense games, but it will beat the purpose of my love to make games.”

But a year and a half later, local Thunk completely broke their rules. He downloaded the killing of the spire. “Oh my goodness,” he wrote. “Now That It's a game. ”

He went on to explain why he started playing first: “I did this because I had some trouble with controller implementation and I wanted to see how they handle the controller input of the card game, but I ended up being attracted to it. Thankfully, I avoided playing it, and until now I'd definitely replicate their incredible design (intentional or sub-secondary).

The local Thunk legacy is filled with interesting insights. First, he explained that in the early days of development, he named the production work folder for Balatro “CardGame” and then…never changed. He also revealed that the entire game's work title is “Joker Poker”.

Local Thunk also provides some insights on abandoned features, including:

• “The only way to upgrade anything is to upgrade cards in the deck with a type of pseudo-store, and these cards can be upgraded multiple times (imagine super automatic pets, pets, pets have different XP/levels when combined, same idea, same idea)”
• “Individual currency for revolving other than percentages;
• “Add the manual shutter to the 'gold seal' on the card when you skip all the card back to the card playback”

We also accepted anecdotes about how Balatro logged in 150 jokes. Obviously the result of poor communication:

“I also met with Playstack (Publisher) this month (October 2023), where I described the final content in the game to them, including '120 Jokers',” Local Thunk wrote. “I had another meeting with them later that week and someone mentioned 150 jokes. I don't remember accidentally saying I was going to do 150 times or whether they frustrated me, but either way, I thought 150 numbers were much better, so I added 30 jokes to the plan.”

Ultimately, the local thunk provides a profound origin story for the name. tl;dr, this is a programming joke:

“My partner was learning to code in R at the time and she asked me ‘How do you name your variables?’ I roared a little about the cannula, using descriptive words, underscores, etc.

“The way variables are declared in LUA is (sometimes) local keywords, so Local Thunk was born! I've been not going to pick this name for a while, but this is the moment I was looking back at the moment when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online.”

There is still a lot to read about Balatro production in Local Thunk blog. Can be found here. Needless to say, we like IGN's Balatro, Give it 9/10 And called it “a deck builder of endlessly satisfying proportions, it’s a pleasure that threatens the derailment of the entire weekend plan as you stay awake too late and stare into the clown’s eyes and run again.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior journalist at IGN. You can find her post on bluesky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Is there a story tip? Send it to [email protected].