The Balatro Timeline

Mike recently shared a link to an update on developer LocalThunk’s blog and I went digging around the rest of his site. His development timeline from 2021 to 2024 for Balatro is great. A peak into his journey from hobbyist game developer to threading the many needles necessary to make a hit game. Grab a cup of coffee and go read it too, but here are few moments that stood out for me:

I have been making games for about 10 years now and I have been doing visual art projects for much longer, and a very important habit I have developed for creative hobby projects is to stop working on something when I no longer feel the drive. This is for 2 main reasons; first, it allows me to move on to the next idea without totally burning out on the last thing. Second, and more importantly in this case, it allows me to take time off guilt free and possibly come back to the project later on without wrapping it in negative emotions.

None of my hobby’s lead to a passion day job, but I’ve struggled with the self-imposed stress of not progressing projects or getting burnt out and hating them countless times.

• 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.

That’s an excellent naming origin, considering “Samichez” is just me thinking that is a fun way to say and spell sandwiches.

More ratings pour in, and by the time the day is done we are sitting above 90 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic. I wasn’t even thinking that this was a possibility, but it sure did build a ton of hype for launch day. I don’t think I would have rated Balatro higher than an 8 and I made the damn thing.

Him giving one of the best game’s since 2020 an 8 is really telling about how close and self-critical we can get to our own work and comparison to what other humans are making.