Balatro developer Local Thunk has shared an in-depth look into the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a surprising revelation, he admits to not playing any roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with one notable exception. As of December 2021, Local Thunk consciously decided to avoid other roguelike games, stating, "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."
However, a year and a half later, Local Thunk broke his rule once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He exclaimed, "Holy shit, now **that** is a game." His initial intent was to study Slay the Spire's controller implementation due to some challenges he faced in his own game, but he ended up getting deeply engrossed in the game. He remarked, "Thank goodness I avoided playing it until now because I surely would have just copied their incredible design (intentionally or subconsciously)."
Local Thunk's blog post is packed with fascinating insights into the development process. He mentions that the working folder for Balatro was originally named "CardGame" and never changed. Additionally, the working title for much of the game's development was "Joker Poker." He also shared details about several scrapped features, including:
- "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"
Local Thunk also recounted an amusing anecdote about how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. He explained that it was the result of a miscommunication with Playstack, the game's publisher. He had initially mentioned "120 Jokers" in a meeting, but later, someone referenced "150 Jokers." Unsure if he had misspoken or if it was a misunderstanding, he decided that 150 was a better number and added 30 more Jokers to the game.
Finally, Local Thunk shared the origin story behind his developer name, "Local Thunk." It stems from a programming joke involving his partner learning to code in R. He recounted, "My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me 'How do you name your variables?' I went on some rant about casing, using descriptive words, underscores, etc. She waits until I am finished and says 'I like to call mine thunk'. I thought that was just about the funniest thing I had ever heard. The way variables are declared in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, thus local thunk was born! I wouldn’t choose this name for quite a while yet but this is the moment I looked back on when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online."
For those interested in diving deeper into the making of Balatro, Local Thunk's full blog post is available [here](link to the blog). IGN has given Balatro a glowing review, 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."
