Balatro - What if it was a little different?
Greetings, Marco!
I hope your week has been productive and most of all, fulfilling.
For today, I want to talk about a little game that has gotten to be quite the treat. If you know anything about playing cards, then you just might find yourself taken with Balatro.
The making of this game has become a little bit of a fascination for me, seeing as something so well designed was made by a one-man developer.
This will be a quick newsletter for today.
So what’s the story behind Balatro?
1: Story Behind the Story ( 2 minute read )
Is this poker?
This has jokers, but doesn’t play like poker.
But it has flushes, and straights.
The jokers don’t act like normal jokers.
My second joker has a banana on it.
This is not poker.
It all started back in the early 2020s. A time where the indie landscape of video games was vibrant and ever-evolving.
We had seen Slay the Spire normalize deckbuilding roguelikes with its dungeon exploration with deck centric battles.
Vampire Survivors redefined minimalism with its stripped back approach.
Inscryption blurred genre and narrative by bucking the expectations with a roguelike by breaking outside of the core gaming loop to introduce a whole other style of gameplay alongside the core deck building.
The landscape was bustling with games that were systems-rich and innovating rapidly.
Enter LocalThunk, a Canadian independent developer.
He asked himself, “What if poker hands were a deckbuilding roguelike?”
This is where it the journey began.
In 2021 to 2022 LocalThunk started experimenting with poker scoring systems.
He used the typical poker hands as a basis for matches and then he added multipliers that you can stack by leveling up those hands throughout your run in the game.
This is where the jokers come in, as they are the primary card types that allow you to create some of the craziest multipliers.
For instance, the banana joker that I mentioned earlier, its name is Cavendish and it provides an immediate and unconditional X3 multiplier to any hand that is played.
This is just one joker card, there are hundreds that not only all have different effects, but that synergize with each other.
Add in the other types of cards in the game that have their own effects such as Arcana and Tarot cards that have additional effects that stack.
This makes for a game that gave players that were hungry for depth a litany of combinations and strategies to discover.
He took something familiar, like poker, and broke the rules.
When the game released to the public, it quickly gained steam and popularity.
Everyone was taken by the Balatro’s brilliance.
Its UI was clean, its feedback loops were near-instant, and its rule-breaking jokers make for a satisfying and elating scoring escalation.
This is nothing quite like when you see your cards and jokers all synergize, your score goes on fire, and then you get a massive score that has too many numbers to even display!
So what can we learn from this?
Well, its quite simple: ask questions.
LocalThunk asked himself a simple question about how he could change Poker just a bit, and out of that was birthed idea after idea that led to the creation of one of the most unique and flat-out satisfying games one could play.
The beauty of it, is that it plays off of our collective knowledge of a preexisting game, Poker.
My grandfather was a huge PC poker fan, and oftentimes would be found relaxing enjoying a nice game of poker on Windows.
It was commonplace to see him clear the screen and have all the cards jump all over the screen.
There has been many a time when playing Balatro that I could totally see my grandpa playing this game if he was around when it came out.
Yes, its that good.
So ask yourself questions.
Let those lead to other questions.
And let those questions lead you to create something that you haven’t before.
2: Creative Prompts From Us (ex. Write a short story, a poem, a song, or draw a quick illustration of these! Let your imagination run free.)
I. Think of a body of work and ask yourself how you could merge it with something else to create something new.
II. Try engaging with a familiar and well known body of work, and see what resonates with you and what you’d like to see changed.
3: Inspirational Quotes From LocalThunk
I. “The core loop had to be satisfying before anything else.”
II. “Balatro is about discovering how systems collide.”
III. “I just wanted to make something that felt good to play.”
Thanks for reading!