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

Local Thunk, the developer behind the popular game Balatro, has shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a candid revelation, he admits to consciously avoiding playing roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with one notable exception.

Starting in December 2021, Local Thunk made a deliberate choice to steer clear of roguelike games. He explains, "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 just once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He was initially drawn to the game to study its controller implementation for card games but found himself deeply engaged. He remarked, "Holy shit, now that is a game." He added, "I did this because I was having some troubles in my controller implementation and I wanted to see how they handled controller inputs for a card game but I ended up getting sucked in. 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 offers a wealth of insights into Balatro's development. He reveals that the game's working folder was simply named "CardGame" and never changed. The working title throughout much of its 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 pseudo-shop, with cards upgradable multiple times, similar to Super Auto Pets.
• A separate currency for rerolls.
• A 'golden seal' feature that would return a card to hand after it had been played if all blinds were skipped.

An amusing anecdote explains how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk had a meeting with the publisher, Playstack, in October 2023, where he mentioned the game would have '120 Jokers.' A miscommunication led to someone mentioning 150 Jokers later that week. Local Thunk decided 150 was a better number and added 30 more Jokers to the game.

The origin of his developer name, Local Thunk, also stems from a programming joke. He shared, "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 the full story of Balatro's development, Local Thunk's blog is a treasure trove of information. IGN has 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."