If you’ve read my review of Balatro, you’ll know that I’m particularly fond of this Poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder. I’ve always loved Poker and I’m partial to a roguelike, too. Thus I am what you might consider to be this game’s core audience.
Except the reaction to Balatro has been much bigger than anyone could have reasonably expected. A fact made even more apparent after the latest confirmation (via Twitter.com) that the game has shifted an incredible 500k copies since it launched in late February. It has become abundantly clear that Balatro is more than just a Poker-themed roguelike. It’s got that secret something that keeps players coming back for more.
Armed with the above context, I was delighted when developer LocalThunk agreed to answer some of my questions. I wanted to know more about the game’s intersecting mechanics, the inspirations that inspired its design, and what the future holds for the developer and for Balatro. It turns out that the references that informed its design, and indeed the overall development process, are much more nuanced than first assumed. Read on for all the details…
First of all, congratulations on the successful launch of the game. Now that it’s out in the wild, what’s the thing that you are most proud of?
I am really happy with how many people have been able to interface with and enjoy this weird thing I created. I think I am most proud of the process I was able to stick to and how it allowed me to create this game freely without ever getting me truly stuck in a creative rut.
I would imagine that most people are well aware of what Balatro is by now, but for the uninitiated, what’s the elevator pitch?
Balatro is a run-based game with playing cards. The central mechanic is to score as many chips as possible to defeat an ever rising required score. There are a bunch of interlocking mechanics that allow you to score more chips as you progress through your run, and synergies that steer you in interesting directions. Balatro is my modern indie take on solitaire with a poker coat of paint!
The Poker theme runs through every aspect of Balatro – what is it about the game that inspired you and what do you think makes it such a nice fit for roguish deckbuilding mechanics?
I don’t think that the poker theme is as pervasive as people think – real poker players will tell you that this game has almost no mechanical similarities to poker apart from the hand rankings. The poker theme was slapped on top of the game I was already creating mainly as an onboarding tool. I don’t play poker, I just think the imagery is interesting and tactile in a way that complements Balatro. This game was inspired by Big Two – a Cantonese card shedding game that I played with friends a lot when I was younger. I wanted to make an online version of the game for those friends to play with me during the pandemic, and it eventually evolved into Balatro.
To answer the question of why I think it makes for a great fit – there was some intention there. Modern playing card games are so pervasive in almost every culture in the world that I think there is something special about standard playing cards themselves as a medium for emergent game design. People love to hold a set of cards in their hand, organize and arrange them, think about which cards make sense to play and which they might want to hold on to. I really wanted to leverage that because it’s such a simple and familiar approach to strategy games that are usually very information dense.
The Jokers bring such variety to the game – can you tell us how you developed that particular mechanic? Were there any cards that you had to cut because they were too powerful?
Early on the game didn’t include any Jokers, the main strategic mechanic was just a shop where you upgrade the level of your actual playing cards. This iteration of the game was lacking and at the time I was looking mainly toward images of playing cards for inspiration – so I came up with the idea of Jokers as a kind of ‘passive’ item. As an artist I got very into this concept because it was immediately apparent there were so many interesting directions I could take these Jokers visually. Every Joker has gone through some kind of balance change; sometimes effects are scrapped entirely, sometimes they’re tweaked. Jokers have had a lot of work to ensure that they are balanced enough to encourage varied gameplay while still remaining interesting.
Taking into account the Tarot cards, the Planets, the Jokers and Spectral cards – what was the hardest thing to balance in the game?
I wouldn’t describe Balatro as a ‘hard’ game to balance – it’s just an ongoing process. To me it’s akin to hanging a picture on the wall: When you hang a picture, instead of making it perfectly level, in my opinion it’s better to just do it by feel. If the picture FEELS level but actually isn’t, that is better than it being technically level but feeling askew. This process is pretty well defined for Balatro at this point so if the testers or community notice something is clearly wrong, it gets a patch, then we reassess. Sometimes I release a card and observe that it’s just too good and cannibalises all the adjacent strategies around it, or that it’s so bad that there are few reasons to ever take it. Luckily for Balatro, almost all balance changes can be made by changing a number (cost, rarity, chip bonus, mult bonus, etc), so the actual changes themselves are often trivial.
As you’ve been able to see more and more people interact with it, what’s the most interesting in-game behaviour that you didn’t see coming?
There have been some pretty interesting things from players in this game. First of all, people are able to come up with strategies and scores I never would be able to do myself. Another thing that I found interesting over the first two weeks of release is the discourse around how random the game feels. There is a lot of randomness, possibly too much, but the metastrategy for Balatro is around mitigating risk and having a build that can’t be easily countered while still being powerful enough to win. The discourse has been shifting more and more towards risk reduction from my vantage, which is really cool to see.
Poker is an inherently social game, but you’ve managed to make it work as a single-player experience. What was the key to making it feel natural to play solo and did you ever contemplate a multiplayer mode?
I was inspired by watching some videos of Luck Be a Landlord to transition this game into more of a single player solitaire experience – I really appreciated the scoring mechanics in that game and the lighter theming than other indie games I had heard about at the time. There have been some ideas for what multiplayer might look like in Balatro but nothing concrete.
When you’re not making games, what do you play? Are there any references in the roguish space that have been particularly important to you?
I mainly play online competitive games, something about them keeps me very engaged. My favourite of the bunch is Rocket League, I always come back to it and I find it’s a great way for me to unwind.
I find rogue-type games fascinating more than I actually play them. While developing Balatro I intentionally avoided playing or watching most games outside of Rocket League in an effort to keep my design ideas fresh and keep myself interested in the design space I was naively exploring. Balatro ended up being the first deckbuilder game I ever played because of this and I do think it’s part of the reason why it has succeeded. It also caused a bunch of hiccups where I found myself reinventing the wheel or missing obvious design flaws, but it was more fun for me as a hobbyist to approach it that way which was far more important. Eventually after about 18 months of development I ended up buying Slay the Spire to learn how they handled controller support for a card game and, of course, that game hooked me. I am certain that if I had played that game before creating Balatro that it would have infiltrated the design of my game.
You’re currently sitting on a Metacritic score of 90 (if I did scores, you’d have got a 10 from me) and the game is enjoying strong launch sales – what’s it like as an indie developer to have a game blow up like this? How does this change things for you?
It’s surreal, certainly a very good feeling to know that I can continue this hobby as a career. I’m just so happy I was able to share a part of my life with so many people in a way they can actively enjoy.
I know it’s early days, but I need to know: what are your long-term plans for Balatro? Are you planning on adding new content via future updates or are you looking for a new project?
I’m excited to get back into the design and implementation of the game again – after the dust has settled from launch. I love working on this game as a creative outlet and even a few years after I started I still fall asleep thinking about all the interesting directions I can go from here. There will certainly be more Balatro to come!
