Balatro developer, Local Thunk, recently shared a fascinating development history on their personal blog. Surprisingly, they revealed minimal roguelike game exposure during Balatro's creation—with a single exception.
Their development timeline notes a conscious decision in December 2021 to cease playing roguelikes. Thunk explains this wasn't to improve the game, but rather to embrace the inherent fun of experimental game design as a hobby. The goal was to make mistakes, reinvent the wheel, and avoid directly borrowing from established designs. While this approach might have yielded a less polished game, it prioritized the joy of the creative process.
However, a year and a half later, Thunk broke their self-imposed rule, downloading Slay the Spire. Their reaction? A simple, emphatic, "Holy shit. Now that is a game."
The reason for this indulgence? Thunk was troubleshooting controller implementation in Balatro and sought inspiration from Slay the Spire's card game controls. The result? A complete immersion in the game, narrowly avoiding subconscious design mimicry.
Thunk's post-mortem offers other intriguing insights. The game's initial working folder was named "CardGame," a label that inexplicably persisted. The working title, for a significant portion of development, was "Joker Poker."
Several scrapped features are also detailed, including:
- A system where card upgrades were the sole method of character progression, similar to Super Auto Pets.
- A separate in-game currency for rerolls.
- A "golden seal" mechanic that returned played cards to the hand after skipping all blinds.
The number of Jokers in the final game, 150, stems from a humorous miscommunication with publisher Playstack. Thunk initially proposed 120, but a later discussion resulted in a revised count of 150, which Thunk ultimately preferred.
Finally, the origin of the developer name "Local Thunk" is revealed. It's a programming-related inside joke stemming from a conversation with their partner learning R programming. The combination of Lua's "local" keyword and their partner's variable naming preference, "thunk," led to the memorable handle.
Thunk's blog post offers a wealth of additional information about Balatro's development. IGN wholeheartedly agrees, awarding the game a 9/10 and praising 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."
