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

Local Thunk, the developer behind the popular game Balatro, recently shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a surprising revelation, he admitted to not playing any roguelike games during the development of Balatro, with one notable exception.

Starting in December 2021, Local Thunk made a deliberate choice to avoid playing roguelike games. He explained that his motivation was not to create a better game but to preserve the joy of exploring game design as a hobby. "I wanted to make mistakes, I wanted to reinvent the wheel, I didn’t want to borrow tried-and-true designs from existing games," he wrote, emphasizing that copying established designs would have detracted from his personal enjoyment of game development.

However, a year and a half later, Local Thunk broke his rule once by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. He was immediately captivated, describing it as "a game" that left a strong impression on him. Initially, he played it to study controller inputs for card games, but he ended up getting deeply involved. He expressed relief at having avoided it earlier, as he feared it might have influenced his design choices too heavily.

Local Thunk's blog post also provided fascinating insights into the development process of Balatro. He revealed that the game's working folder was simply named "CardGame" and never changed, and the working title was "Joker Poker" for much of its development. He also shared details about scrapped features, such as a version where card upgrades were the only way to progress, a separate currency for rerolls, and a 'golden seal' feature for playing cards.

An amusing anecdote explained how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. It was the result of a miscommunication with his publisher, Playstack, who thought he mentioned 150 Jokers instead of the intended 120. Local Thunk decided that 150 was a better number and added the extra Jokers.

Lastly, Local Thunk shared the origin of his developer name, "Local Thunk." It stemmed from a humorous conversation with his partner about variable naming in programming, leading to the playful combination of the Lua programming language's "local" keyword and the term "thunk."

For those interested in the full story, Local Thunk's blog offers a wealth of information about the making of Balatro. IGN has praised the game, awarding it a 9/10 and describing it as "A deck-builder of endlessly satisfying proportions" that can captivate players for hours on end.