Balatro developer Local Thunk has shared an in-depth account of the game's development journey on his personal blog, revealing that he consciously avoided playing roguelike games during its creation—except for one notable exception. As of December 2021, Local Thunk decided to steer clear of other roguelike titles, stating, "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 made an exception to his rule by downloading and playing Slay the Spire. His reaction was immediate and strong: "Holy shit," he wrote, "now **that** is a game." Initially, he played Slay the Spire to address issues with controller implementation in Balatro, but he found himself deeply engrossed in the game. He noted, "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 provides a wealth of fascinating details about the game's development. He shares that the project folder was initially named "CardGame" and remained unchanged throughout development. The working title for much of the game's development was "Joker Poker." Additionally, he discussed several scrapped features, including:

• "a version where the only way to upgrade anything is to upgrade the cards in your deck in a sort of pseudo-shop, and those cards can be upgraded multiple times (think like Super Auto Pets, pets have different XP/levels when combined, same idea)"
• "a separate currency for rerolls outside of %1quot;"
• "a ‘golden seal’ to be added to playing cards when you skip all blinds that returns that card to hand after it has been played"

An interesting anecdote explains how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk recounted a meeting with his publisher, Playstack, in October 2023, where he initially mentioned having "120 Jokers." A subsequent meeting led to a misunderstanding about the number, resulting in a decision to increase it to 150: "I also had a meeting with Playstack [the publisher] this month [October 2023] where I described to them the final content in the game, including ‘120 Jokers’," Local Thunk wrote. "Later that week I had another meeting with them, and someone mentioned something about 150 Jokers. I couldn’t remember if I accidentally said I was going to make 150 or if they misheard me, but either way I thought that 150 was a much better number so I added 30 more Jokers to the plan."

Lastly, Local Thunk shared the origin story behind his developer name. It stemmed from a humorous moment with his partner, who was learning to code in R. When asked about naming variables, Local Thunk explained various conventions, only for his partner to respond with, "I like to call mine thunk." This led to the creation of "local thunk," a playful nod to Lua programming: "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 more details about Balatro's development, Local Thunk's full blog post is available [here](#). IGN has praised Balatro, awarding 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."