Balatro's developer, known as Local Thunk, recently shared an in-depth look at the game's development journey on his personal blog. In a surprising revelation, he disclosed that he intentionally avoided playing roguelike games during Balatro's development, with one notable exception. As of December 2021, Local Thunk decided not to engage with any roguelike games, 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 broke his rule once by downloading Slay the Spire. He expressed his admiration for the game, writing, "Holy shit, now **that** is a game." His initial intention was to study Slay the Spire's controller implementation due to challenges he faced with his own game's controller inputs. However, he found himself deeply engrossed in the game, thankful for having avoided it until then to prevent copying its design either intentionally or subconsciously.

Local Thunk's post-mortem is rich with intriguing insights into Balatro's development. Initially, the game's working folder was simply named "CardGame," a name that remained unchanged throughout the process. The game was also referred to as "Joker Poker" during much of its development. He also shared details about various features that were considered but ultimately scrapped, such as:

• "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 amusing anecdote revealed how Balatro ended up with 150 Jokers. Local Thunk explained that during a meeting with his publisher, Playstack, in October 2023, he mentioned having "120 Jokers" in the game. Later, due to a misunderstanding, someone referred to "150 Jokers." Local Thunk decided that 150 was a better number and thus added an additional 30 Jokers to the game.

The origin of Local Thunk's developer name is equally entertaining. It stems from a programming joke shared with his partner, who was learning to code in R. When asked about naming variables, Local Thunk went into detail about best practices. His partner then humorously suggested using "thunk" as a variable name. This led to the creation of "local thunk," a playful nod to Lua programming syntax, which eventually became his developer handle.

For those interested in the full story of Balatro's development, Local Thunk's blog offers a wealth of information. 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."