Local Thunk Didn't Play Any Roguelike Games During Balatro's Development...Except Slay the Spire

Balatro developer, Local Thunk, recently shared a fascinating development history on their personal blog, revealing a surprising detail: they intentionally avoided playing most rogue-likes during Balatro's creation—with one exception.

Their development timeline shows a conscious decision in December 2021 to abstain from playing rogue-likes. Thunk explains this wasn't to improve the game, but because game development is a hobby, not a business. Experimentation and reinvention were prioritized over borrowing established designs. While a more polished game might have resulted from studying existing titles, that would have contradicted their creative process.

However, a year and a half later, this self-imposed rule was broken—once. After downloading Slay the Spire, Thunk exclaimed, "Holy shit, now that is a game." The reason? They were troubleshooting controller implementation and wanted to study Slay the Spire's approach to card game controls. Fortunately, this foray occurred late in development, preventing unintentional design mimicry.

Thunk's post-mortem offers further intriguing insights. The project's initial working folder was inexplicably named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout development. The game's working title was "Joker Poker" for a considerable period.

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 currency for rerolls, and a "golden seal" mechanic that returned played cards to the hand after skipping blind draws.

The number of Jokers (150) resulted from a miscommunication with publisher Playstack. Thunk initially proposed 120, but a later discussion led to a change to 150, which they felt was superior.

Finally, the origin of the name "Local Thunk" is explained. It's a programming joke stemming from a conversation with their partner learning R programming. The combination of Lua's "local" keyword and their partner's suggestion of "thunk" as a variable name led to the perfect developer handle.

Thunk's blog post offers a much more detailed account of Balatro's development. IGN, clearly impressed, awarded Balatro a 9/10, praising it as "A deck-builder of endlessly satisfying proportions...the sort of fun that threatens to derail whole weekend plans."