The creator of Balatro has revealed fresh details on the hit indie card game’s development, including the fact he gave up playing other roguelikes for more than two years to avoid subconsciously borrowing ideas.
LocalThunk, the Canadian IT-worker-turned-indie-game-maestro, published a lengthy timeline of Balatro’s development today on his blog. It features insights into his design decisions while working on the project, and notes about his own personal life and health over the course of the last three years.
In December 2021, after beginning work on a Balatro prototype, LocalThunk said he made “a very conscious effort not to play any more roguelike games starting now”.
“I want to be crystal clear here and say that this was not because I thought it would result in [Balatro being] 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,” LocalThunk continued.
“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.”
It was a pledge he seemingly kept until May 2023, when LocalThunk writes:
“I downloaded Slay the Spire and played it for the first time. Holy shit. Now that is a game.
“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).”
The full development timeline is lengthy but well worth a read for anyone who’s played Balatro and is interested at what point various features made it into the game (which for a long time was alternatively named Joker Poker).
Balatro’s fundamental Chip X Mult scoring system was part of the game since its earliest days – back when it was called Big Cheat – in 2021. However, it wasn’t until late 2023 that the decision to include as many as 150 Jokers in the game was finalised.
It was also during late 2023 that LocalThunk reports on difficulties with his health, due to the increasing attention that Balatro was getting and the long hours spent working on its development.
Balatro began life as a game project LocalThunk hoped to share with friends, or potentially launch on Steam just to have something he could show to a future employer. As of January 2025, the game has now sold 5m copies.
“It’s the game that’s been on everyone’s lips (and brain, and console, and phone and practically every device going) since it took the world by storm back in February,” our Katharine wrote, praising Balatro as one of Eurogamer’s best games of 2024. “Balatro has been a force of nature this year.”