I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.
My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.
> It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
I think Balatro is way too hard to be a good stress reliever. Unlike solitaire, I can barely win a run in Balatro and there's no indication as to what I could do better. I actually find it stressful more than stress relieving, if anything.
Hey! I've played it for a while now (and haven't even followed any Reddit / YouTube guides yet).
Early game: Get a joker that gives you a big mult (e.g., Half Joker w/ +20 Mult for small hands). This will allow you to survive while you build out your points engine. (You can survive with flushes in the early game, but it can get harder to win with flush later, due to Bosses, unless you have flush friendly Jokers and a large hand size.)
Mid game: Generate $$$ so you can buy planets and tarot cards. Once you're happy with your jokers, you want to level up the hands that work well with those Jokers. Try easier hands like Two Pair or Pair or High Card. (Assuming you can generate enough cash to level up those hands.)
Tip: Blue Seals are helpful!
To Win: Look for jokers that get you increasingly higher +mult or xmult for things you'll do anyways. There are jokers that increase mult for using tarot cards, or jokers that increase xmult for adding new cards to your deck.
Tip: Steel cards are also awesome.
Tip: If you have an xmult joker, move it to the right side, as jokers trigger from left to right. You want to multiply after you add!
Disclaimer: I have not beaten ante 11 yet. I can get a couple million points with my strategy, but 7+ million is too difficult. I don't see an easy path to naneinf (not a typo). I guess I'll need to give up and watch some YouTube guides as some point.
I feel like I win about 50% or more of my games on regular white stake difficulty. I've won some red stakes, but I don't really feel a need to make the game much harder. I think if I played it safe I could win 75% or more of my games on white stake. The reason my win rate on base difficulty is lower is because I like to try weird strategies with different jokers.
The amazing thing about Balatro is.... there are many many different paths to a victory. Everyone has their own favorite joker, and it might all be different.
For a long time, I liked two pair hands the most. Now most of my games use pair or high card. I find it too difficult to get to ante 9+ with a 5-card strategy. (4-card flushes are OK.)
All of this, though unless I have a planet-based joker, then I don't personally find the planets all that appealing - it really feels like a drop in the bucket compared to jokers in terms of base chips and mult.
It can turn into a brain burner very quickly. Tracking the interactions from five jokers (in order) can be a mental gymnastic session in some instances :) I find I enjoy it more when I've not just ended a taxing day (writing/troubleshooting software).
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.
It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi
It's a roguelike deckbuilder. The randomness is necessary to the genre.
I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized. The only way the developer makes more money is through players telling other players how fun the game is, which convinces them to buy it.
> players telling other players how fun the game is
I wonder if we've collectively been trained to perceive addictiveness as fun. It's good that the developer isn't being directly monetizing eyeball-hours, but when users have grown to expect that specific dopamine hit that proves addictive, you end up having to include it anyway.
What's interesting to me is that despite all that (the escalating lights and noise as your score ticks up, and the hypnotic effect of the sound slowing down and speeding up when you fail/restart the run, are two big examples), I seem to be the only person who hit a wall with Balatro. I enjoyed it for a few days, saw what grinding out all of the jokers/stickers would be like, and put it down. Not in an insulted way, but in a "I've had a good meal, I'm full, and I'm happy to leave the rest of my plate" way. I find this particularly interesting because other games do have an ability to grab me by the throat.
I was this way too, until I bought it again on my phone. Now its my commute game and I have clocked in a huge number of hours. But in small, 1-2 run sessions
I think both of these are true. Balatro is a like a finely honed blade of dopamine harvesting -- it truly does build on the most addictive facets of gaming we have discovered thus far. It is also laudable in the ethos of its designer, expressed through the game. As others have said, there is not and will never be monetization, per LocalThunk's distaste for gambling(we can be pedantic and argue that at the core of each roguelike is a gambling aspect but).
I think there is a fine line here between the cynicist 'never indulge' and the consoomer/accelerationist 'do as you will'
I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.
I was gonna recommend the same one. I wanna add that Hempuli (Baba is You, Noita) also made a solitaire collection inspired by Zachtronics. It's just 3 bucks on his itchio and it's something I play while I have my coffee.
The Solitaire Mystery is also the name of a very interesting novel that explores all kinds of permutations of the cards, suits, etc, etc, by Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
I LOVE that you let the player tweak those variables in the mechanics. Many of us want to be able to relax with a nice comfy game for half an hour, and "comfy" means setting the difficulty just right.
My partner used to relax with Flipflop Solitaire[1], which lets you choose how many suits there are in the deck. These days they play lots of Balatro with the checkered deck[2].
Thirding this recommendation, Fortune's Favor solitaire and Shenzen solitaire from this collection are some of my favorite variants ever. Either of them would be worth the price of admission alone.
I absolutely love the Zachtronics solitaires. I play at least one a day on my phone. That said, I wish they were slightly better designed for phones, since the text/images and touch targets can be a little small. It's too bad Zachtronics is no more -- it'd be nice if they were able to do some UI updates.
First time I've played any game through the end just because I wanted to see an ad! It's really well made, gotta confess I went the CLI route because I don't know how to design GUIs with moving parts. Also, I wanted to play my game with controls tailored for the keyboard layout (ASDFGHJ keys control the columns if using QWERTY).
That's long been my favorite Android version of klondike too.
But my favorite favorite remains the old Windows 95 Solitaire. I keep a copy around even on Linux through wine to play sometimes on PC. The main reason? I still love the ending animation of all the cards springing down without clearing the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uev21NTzom8 I don't understand why no other version seems to want to implement this ending animation, it's the best one of all time.
This is why I play it with actual physical cards. I learned it as kid so partly it's a comfort ritual, and partly the tactile interaction is very soothing.
It also "forces" you to keep playing when it gets tough, as a complete shuffle plus new setup isn't just a simple click away. It's also nice to get off the screen for a while.
I recently bought a smaller deck of cards, like half or three quarters of the size of a normal deck or so. Makes it easier to play without needing a huge table.
One nice side benefit of DNS-level adblocking (pi-hole, etc) is that a lot of mobile games never end up showing ads. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in particular I play a euchre game on my phone that frequently asks me to "pay X to play with no ads" and every time I think "What ads?"
That said, sometimes I pay to support the developer if I like the game. Sucks when a game I like doesn't offer the "remove ads" option.
Was looking for this on iPhone as well some weeks ago, and came across a Solitaire that is included in Apple Arcade that works really well, doesn't have any ads or other distractions, just plain Solitaire.
And another bonus is that Balatro (which the submission author created) is included in Apple Arcade too, which was the original reason I got Arcade.
>It’s now been over a year since launch and I am still playing Balatro almost daily. I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I think this is really important, especially for games. Play the game you make!
There's a fair number of games that I've played where the developer clearly has not sat down and played through the game as a player would. No skips, no custom developer-only starts or features, no rushing through sections "because I know what happens", etc. To be fair, though, these are often below $5 games on Steam, so I'm sure a chunk of them are cash grabs rather than an honest attempt at making a successful game.
The story of the Hotline Miami 2 devs comes to mind where they mentioned that they play tested the game at half speed a lot of the times, which, including many other factors, contributes to the game being way harder than the first part.
No, he said he doesn't play them AFTER they release. But he plays them constantly when they're in development. One of the difficulty rules at FromSoft is that each boss and area has to be beatable by Miyazaki (which he said is a good baseline, because he likes challenge but doesn't consider himself good at games).
I wonder who he does consider good at games. FromSoft games are so hard that Dark Souls is a synonym for "really hard game". If someone can beat one of those games, I think it's fair to say they are good at games.
"To force players to get out of their comfort zone and explore the design of the game in a way they might not if this were a fully unguided gaming experience."
It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing draw poker in an attempt to build different hands based on your strategy.
I mean, that might be the intent on paper, but when I was going through a game like Dead Cells, I still had specific weapons or layouts that I was especially effective with--and in practice that just meant that if I didn't manage to get my favorite bat or nun-chuck weapons to drop, there was a good chance I wasn't going to be able to complete that run.
Dead Cells's "Custom Mode" lets you eliminate loads of objects from the set offered, making it much more likely for you to get weapons you want.
It's somewhat unique among the roguelites I've seen in not only offering this but also treating it as valid play: any wins/achievements in this mode (e.g. more BC) will unlock properly.
So, no need to put up with Spartan Sandals ever again!
Non-twitch based roguelites make it somewhat easier to learn and deploy those alternate strategies in my experience because you can read a bit of a clue online, think about it, and then play through a round slowly and thoughtfully. In an action game, you know, you pick up the sickle weapon for the first time and you may have literally seconds of experience with it before you die.
I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.
Yep. Enter The Gungeon is my personal favourite among roguelites but it's punishingly hard to get the hang of, and the huge number of weapons makes it quite likely that you'll only get semi-decent guns for an entire run – even when you're playing as the Gunslinger, who activates all synergies automatically.
The upside of putting in the time is that when you get good, it feels fantastic.
If you haven't tried it, I'd recommend Dead Cells. Yes, it's twitchy action, but it's easier than Gungeon to get good at, and the parkour-like flow looks and feels wonderful from quite early on. TBH it's a better game than Gungeon in most respects.
Balatro is the only game where my score has maxed out the value of a double precision floating point number. And this isn't some crazy speedrunning strategy, it's very achievable for normal players. It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
If you want the numbers to go even more up, the Talisman mod reworks everything to use BigInts for practically unlimited number go up potential. It's mainly intended to be paired with other mods like Cryptid which add obscenely overpowered cards, but Talisman can be used on its own if you just want to attempt the normally unwinnable ante 39 and beyond in vanilla.
Wow you can do that in a mod? Crazy. I wondered if localthunk would do this or if it was actually kind of nice for the game to have a "kill screen" ending like the old arcade games.
Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once.
It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"
The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.
It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.
The "time boxing" is coming to be one of my favorite aspects of the roguelite genre. It's a nice structure for a combination of a deep and compelling game, that opens up at a reasonable speed, but also doesn't call for 80 hours to "finish" it. I like JRPGs but even so they quite often overstay their welcome. Death may wipe nearly all your progress but you can easily try again in another timebox.
(I played some of the classic Roguelikes, and spent a lot of time with Angband, but that was one of their problems... winning still took many hours, could easily be dozens, and so death became very scary. They were on to something, but the modern rebalancing of "hand it all out more quickly, and resolve the game in an hour or two and let them come back" seems a much more practical approach in a lot of ways.)
I never played Angband but got into the closely related Sil. Totally agree on your characterization (and a fan of your HN posts for well over a decade).
It really does work that way. It’s a perfect game if you have ~25 minutes to kill. It’s fairly complex, but doesn’t really require player to keep much information between runs. I hate going back to a game after a few weeks only to discover that I no longer remember how to play it.
Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).
As you go up the antes, the number of viable strategies decreases, until it narrows down to just one or two a number of antes quite a ways before the "end".
IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.
Different people play at different speeds. And some builds require more thought than others. I find that it takes about half an hour on average for me to win a run (reach ante 9).
Nah, it's pretty common for runs to take that long, especially if you're going into Endless. Some of the top Balatro streamers I watch will frequently have runs that take that long (or longer).
It does help to increase the game speed. I've got mine up to max speed (but I played it at normal speed for quite awhile, while I got used to the mechanics).
I can still remember how to play the original Doom after all these years (and where all the secrets are!) but the modern editions have so many controls and weapon modes that if I don't play it for a month I don't remember how anything works.
> My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day. I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way.
I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.
I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.
I bought Belatro and Zachtronics solitaire a few weeks ago, more or less on impulse. The Zachtronics was disappointing primarily because the UI is too small on my iPhone, and I have old eyes. Belatro is great.
I'm something of a Solitaire addict. In addition to Belatro, the Microsoft Solitaire Collection is the only game on my iPhone, and I happily pay Microsoft $10 a year because the design is the most comfortable for me. Klondike soothes me like nothing else, but it's nice to be able to put a little variety in the game for me with FreeCell, Pyramid or TriPeaks (I'm not a Spider fan).
You should try out FlipFlop solitaire by Zach Gage if you haven't already, definitely a fun spin on the solitaire concept and the game plays very smoothly.
Interesting to see this here. I've commented a few times on HN about recently getting into card games (e.g. various solitaire games, gin rummy, presidents, spades, trash...etc) and domino games. It's a lot of fun, social (even solitaire as we teach each other new versions), and mentally engaging. There's no screen and it all just feels less wasteful in some weird way.
Board game night would do the same thing, but there's something beautiful about how much variety you can get out of a single deck of cards or some double-six dominos. There's no setup or 50 page rulebook required either. Most card games I just watch a YouTube video and then just remember how to play for years.
Lol. I tried. Went to several classes and somehow still never learned to play. I can't tell if all the structure and complexity is worth the extra headache compared to games like Spades or other bidding/trick games. I have heard that it's supposedly by far the best there is though, so perhaps I should try again. I do play Texas 42, which is kind of like bridge with dominos. It's wildly popular in Texas, but hasn't reached much further. There's a lot of strategy to the bidding, but I'm not sure how closely it ranks to Bridge.
When I was a kid, if I couldn't be on the computer for whatever reason I'd occupy myself with a pack of cards. I'd play solitaire (Klondike) over and over. I would vary the draw count and see how that affected the game. I'd sort the cards beforehand and see if that made it any easier or harder to win. I'd try to find the optimal order the cards would have to be in before dealing for the game to be won in the least number of steps. Ultimately I figured Solitaire was just a roundabout way of sorting a deck of cards and started messing with other sorting methods. I still, every time I see a pack of cards, feel that urge to just sort and sort and sort. It wasn't even "fun", I was just so desperate for mental stimulation.
It was for me too, but only for about a month or so. Once I got 19 of 20 achievements (and the last one is nigh-impossible), I lost interest, and haven't played it since. (Though this post is tempting me to try a game or two with a different non-addicted attitude!)
This is in stark contrast with Slay the Spire, which I've been playing compulsively since 2019.
Great read, I always love reading about the thoughts and intentions behind game design.
> I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I do see the relaxing component of the game once you’ve got the hang of it and are playing on white stake. But I do feel like the game encourages you to take on more difficult/frustrating stakes and decks, so for someone working on gold stake for the black deck for example, it would absolutely not be something to play before bed (unless you’re in the mood to cry yourself to sleep)
Reading this makes me sad actually, because I grew up on windows machines (starting with windows 3.1) and have so many memories of Solitaire that came shipped with windows. The deck variations, the little and big effects (like winning!) I played it so much as a grade schooler. Now that mac is so ubiquitous, most kids wont ever know the simple pleasure of playing solitaire.
Forget Mac, people, kids play on their phones first. And yeah, it's far from the offline simple please that is solitaire. I wonder what they'll say when they reach this stage of life. Today's popular things seem soulless to me, but I'm sure they are connecting to it (and to things I don't know about) just the same as I did back then.
Don't worry, Windows is still far, far more ubiquitous. The bigger reason people don't play solitaire as much as they used to is that it is no longer the only game installed on their PC.
So many people in the 90s learned solitaire playing it on a work from a lack of other options on their work PC. Now with the so many games on the web and your smartphone, you might not even try it.
People give Microsoft a lot of shit, but including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
> including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
Brillant, sure, but not completely sure it was controversial or bold, they have stated that it was primarily included in Windows 3.0 to help people get used to the new paradigms (for Windows) of the mouse and drag and drop, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire
Windows Solitaire mostly died because Microsoft strangled it with microtransactions and ads during the Windows 8 days.
What went from a simple minigame you could fire up at any time got transformed into this monstrosity that kept forcing ads on you, urging you to buy premium versions, adding "engagement" nonsense (daily missions) and selling you back the same features that came free in the Windows 7 version.
ive always seen the reason MS included solitaire and minesweeper was to teach people how to use a mouse and a gui.
I can remember even in the early 2000s when we started installing PCs instead of green screen terminals at different locations having employees play solitaire as a way to get them used to their new computers and learning how to use a mouse.
What a thoughtful post. I think there is a narrative that localthunk is a "shitty programmer" (which he might very well be), but that by extension, it also means that he just got lucky and bumblefucked his way into massive success - almost as though he didn't know any better.
A post like this dispels that narrative - he clearly put a ton of thought into the design of that game and was incredibly intentional about where he wanted it to go.
In what quarters is that narrative? Surely one only has to play Balatro for an hour or two to understand the incredible game design effort that underpins it all, which is brought so vibrantly to life by the music, art, animations, and all the rest of it.
I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.
My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it takes to make a game like Balatro by yourself. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. But so is calling LocalThunk a “shitty programmer” over some questionable if-else logic.
People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.
It's verbose and could be simplified, but also looks like something you write once and never look at again. If it works it makes no sense to spend any more time on it.
Yeah, working on a game myself and ... sometimes you just gotta do stuff like that.
Working on a game solo requires juggling several wildly different disciplines at the same time. Sometimes you're in "game designer" mode, you need to fix a bug or add a feature, and you bonk in the caveman thing that obviously works.
Solo gamedev is basically the "startups should accumulate technical debt" meme on steroids. As long as you can understand the code, nobody cares about how it looks. Only how the game plays.
He clearly comes across as a conscious game designer as well. And programming doesn't need to be good on today's machines. Many of the indie successes are shit software, like Minecraft, Valheim, Cities Skylines, Project Zomboid, and I'm sure there's many others. Great product design and PR are infinitely more important than software quality.
I have never heard that assertion, I don’t know how anyone can play Balatro and not feel that it is a deeply intentional creation. I think localthunk would be the first to tell you they got lucky with how it found an audience outside of themselves, but everything in the game oozes polish and intention.
I can see that having even bits of modification impacts lots of lines, where if written just a bit more saner, it could impact just a few.
Of course everyone is absolutely free to do the things however they want on their project. It's just that bad code, and bad choices bite back sometimes really badly. Project Zomboid is built in LUA for example, and it shows, it's a horrorshow not just to play, but to develop it as well. Their programmers spend a lot of time with just refactoring things. Besides functionality, maintainability should be a huge focus in my experience, so that the devs don't hate life if they have to touch the code again.
The example you post is out of context and maybe a bit overly verbose but again it’s one guy maintaining it and is perfectly readable. Does anyone really struggle to understand that?
I’m back working on a twenty plus year old codebase (and game) that’s ~3 millions loc and would kill for something simple like that rather than some of the overabstracted crimes lurking within.
Yeah, without context criticism of this code is silly.
What if this wasn't always how cards worked? What if the mapping was (at one point in development) not straightforward? Or localthunk had some ideas and wanted to leave the door open to a more complex mapping scheme?
Undertale's code base is apparently no better. For games I don't think code quality is nearly as paramount; there's not a whole lot of maintenance going on there, though this doesn't apply to live service games.
Even if the underlying code is "bad", who cares? There are far more important skills in indie game development then programming ability. I'd much rather play an interesting, well-designed game with a few bugs and messy code over a well-programmed but boring game.
There are a lot of things I do not think are good uses of AI, but dropping into circles you are not apart of and getting your bearings is one of my favorite use cases.
The other day my friends were talking about a "nemesis mechanic" in a game that was good but patented and never used? I asked GPT about it because I just wanted a short summary of what it was and why it was cool.
It looks like it would have worked here too:
What is localthunk? What is "Balatro"?
1. LocalThunk: LocalThunk is a pseudonymous game developer known for creating the poker-themed roguelike deck-building game Balatro. The developer operates under this pseudonym, which is derived from a method of declaring variables in the game development framework they use, Löve .
2. Balatro: This is a game developed by LocalThunk, released in 2024. Balatro is a poker-themed roguelike deck-building game that involves playing poker hands to score points and defeat various challenges. It gained significant acclaim, winning multiple awards for its innovative gameplay and design .
For more details, you can refer to the Wikipedia page on Balatro. No specific standalone information on LocalThunk was retrieved beyond the association with Balatro.
If you spent as long reading search results for "Balatro" as you did writing this comment, you would have enough context to understand what localthunk and balatro are.
I find your musing on the topic interesting, if only as a reminder that people have largely forgotten to help themselves to the free information that surrounds us.
I don't think that was his point. He wasn't asking specifically what Balatro was. He just marvels at the fact that there are so many niche interests out there that their very existence is unknown to him.
Your statement about people having forgotten how to help themselves to information is borderline insulting. A little like sending somebody a "let me google that for you" link.
YouTube is such a great, single-source, area for this. It's wild how many 10m+ subscriber youtube channels that I've never even heard of. So much variety in the world :)
TLDR: Balatro is a roguelike card game where in you make poker hands to score points. You can enhance cards and get jokers that have more effects.
It wont a ton of awards this past year (it's just about a year old) and was incredibly well received.
Localthunk is the developer. I believe he did everything for the PC version himself (except maybe a single joker's art). He has a publisher that helped port to pretty much every other platform you can think of.
> I think that’s one of the reasons why there isn’t a player character, health, or classic ‘enemies’ in the game as well.
This was the thing I found most interesting when I started playing the game, because it's so different from almost all games these days (especially roguelikes). I initially found it off-putting (part of me wanted more context for what was happening), but the more I played the more it made sense. And his comparison to Solitaire really drives that home.
But also, despite the lack of a character or enemies, the game has a huge amount of character, which I think was critical for its success.
In terms of the low stakes feel, I think calling it a “boss blind” is really the only thing that I could possibly point to critically.
It’s amazing how that one word can change the entire vibe. It evokes a much more serious feel to it for me. Not sure what I’d call it, but I wonder if a different word would suddenly alter the whole vibe just a bit more towards that stated goal in the first paragraph.
honestly without context for what this blog is for, or a link to the things it references (klondike/solitaire?) it's hard to want to read the full thing
I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.
My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.
> It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
I think Balatro is way too hard to be a good stress reliever. Unlike solitaire, I can barely win a run in Balatro and there's no indication as to what I could do better. I actually find it stressful more than stress relieving, if anything.
Hey! I've played it for a while now (and haven't even followed any Reddit / YouTube guides yet).
Early game: Get a joker that gives you a big mult (e.g., Half Joker w/ +20 Mult for small hands). This will allow you to survive while you build out your points engine. (You can survive with flushes in the early game, but it can get harder to win with flush later, due to Bosses, unless you have flush friendly Jokers and a large hand size.)
Mid game: Generate $$$ so you can buy planets and tarot cards. Once you're happy with your jokers, you want to level up the hands that work well with those Jokers. Try easier hands like Two Pair or Pair or High Card. (Assuming you can generate enough cash to level up those hands.)
Tip: Blue Seals are helpful!
To Win: Look for jokers that get you increasingly higher +mult or xmult for things you'll do anyways. There are jokers that increase mult for using tarot cards, or jokers that increase xmult for adding new cards to your deck.
Tip: Steel cards are also awesome.
Tip: If you have an xmult joker, move it to the right side, as jokers trigger from left to right. You want to multiply after you add!
Disclaimer: I have not beaten ante 11 yet. I can get a couple million points with my strategy, but 7+ million is too difficult. I don't see an easy path to naneinf (not a typo). I guess I'll need to give up and watch some YouTube guides as some point.
I feel like I win about 50% or more of my games on regular white stake difficulty. I've won some red stakes, but I don't really feel a need to make the game much harder. I think if I played it safe I could win 75% or more of my games on white stake. The reason my win rate on base difficulty is lower is because I like to try weird strategies with different jokers.
The amazing thing about Balatro is.... there are many many different paths to a victory. Everyone has their own favorite joker, and it might all be different.
For a long time, I liked two pair hands the most. Now most of my games use pair or high card. I find it too difficult to get to ante 9+ with a 5-card strategy. (4-card flushes are OK.)
All of this, though unless I have a planet-based joker, then I don't personally find the planets all that appealing - it really feels like a drop in the bucket compared to jokers in terms of base chips and mult.
It can turn into a brain burner very quickly. Tracking the interactions from five jokers (in order) can be a mental gymnastic session in some instances :) I find I enjoy it more when I've not just ended a taxing day (writing/troubleshooting software).
> - You know from the start you may not win every round. > - Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
Nailed it. A good rogue-like deck-builder should always have these qualities. My favorite for a few years now - Slay the Spire - lives by this.
Maybe it’s a comfort game for you. But it’s an addiction for me. I need to stop, so I can find something else to get addicted to.
Hello, it's me, Factorio.
Factorio is not a game, it's a lifestyle.
I have known about this game for a while. I have never bought it because I fear for my productivity.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.
It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi
It's a roguelike deckbuilder. The randomness is necessary to the genre.
I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized. The only way the developer makes more money is through players telling other players how fun the game is, which convinces them to buy it.
> players telling other players how fun the game is
I wonder if we've collectively been trained to perceive addictiveness as fun. It's good that the developer isn't being directly monetizing eyeball-hours, but when users have grown to expect that specific dopamine hit that proves addictive, you end up having to include it anyway.
Idk, I think it's also just fair to say that one finds Balatro fun. Not everything has to have a psychological basis for harm.
There's also nothing timed in balatro, so there's no need for the next game to be _now_.
>I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized.
Monetization doesn't really affect addiction, which was the question at hand.
What's interesting to me is that despite all that (the escalating lights and noise as your score ticks up, and the hypnotic effect of the sound slowing down and speeding up when you fail/restart the run, are two big examples), I seem to be the only person who hit a wall with Balatro. I enjoyed it for a few days, saw what grinding out all of the jokers/stickers would be like, and put it down. Not in an insulted way, but in a "I've had a good meal, I'm full, and I'm happy to leave the rest of my plate" way. I find this particularly interesting because other games do have an ability to grab me by the throat.
Perhaps it was too overt?
I was this way too, until I bought it again on my phone. Now its my commute game and I have clocked in a huge number of hours. But in small, 1-2 run sessions
I think both of these are true. Balatro is a like a finely honed blade of dopamine harvesting -- it truly does build on the most addictive facets of gaming we have discovered thus far. It is also laudable in the ethos of its designer, expressed through the game. As others have said, there is not and will never be monetization, per LocalThunk's distaste for gambling(we can be pedantic and argue that at the core of each roguelike is a gambling aspect but).
I think there is a fine line here between the cynicist 'never indulge' and the consoomer/accelerationist 'do as you will'
I love Solitaire - it's such a nice way to kill a few minutes while waiting for something else.
Unfortunately, many solitaire phone apps are filled with ads, slow, or have clunky controls.
A few years ago, however, I found https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire... . Its free and open source, and quite fast with nice shortcuts to move the cards.
I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.
I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Greatly designed solitaire games. I play them every day on my commute to work.
I was gonna recommend the same one. I wanna add that Hempuli (Baba is You, Noita) also made a solitaire collection inspired by Zachtronics. It's just 3 bucks on his itchio and it's something I play while I have my coffee.
https://hempuli.itch.io/a-solitaire-mystery
Funny enough it has a "Royal Flush Solitaire" where you make poker hands and your goal is to reach 240 points.
Binary Solitaire and Transformation are my favorites.
The Solitaire Mystery is also the name of a very interesting novel that explores all kinds of permutations of the cards, suits, etc, etc, by Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
https://rezmason.github.io/patience
I LOVE that you let the player tweak those variables in the mechanics. Many of us want to be able to relax with a nice comfy game for half an hour, and "comfy" means setting the difficulty just right.
My partner used to relax with Flipflop Solitaire[1], which lets you choose how many suits there are in the deck. These days they play lots of Balatro with the checkered deck[2].
[1] http://www.flipflopsolitaire.com/
[2] https://balatrogame.fandom.com/wiki/Checkered_Deck
Thirding this recommendation, Fortune's Favor solitaire and Shenzen solitaire from this collection are some of my favorite variants ever. Either of them would be worth the price of admission alone.
I absolutely love the Zachtronics solitaires. I play at least one a day on my phone. That said, I wish they were slightly better designed for phones, since the text/images and touch targets can be a little small. It's too bad Zachtronics is no more -- it'd be nice if they were able to do some UI updates.
I heard from an obscure source (a former Zachtronics intern in a stream chat) that they're currently building a new game
Since Zachtronics only ever had one intern, I heard the same thing from the same source (but through different means)!
I have the same gripe about Balatro. Tons of hours on computer, was super stoked for it on phones. Too small for my old eyes.
Using a lightweight PWA (progressive web app) is also an option: https://FreeSolitaire.win (self-plug).
Doesn’t generate unwinnable games[1] & detects dead-ends. Works offline after the first visit. No ads until game over, and they aren’t obtrusive.
Often lauded on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972075 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031052.
1: The probability that a random deal is unwinnable is ~20%. Wikipedia has a section on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...
Nice! I should add only-winnable generation to my own Solitaire, it's adfree, although it has extremely clunky controls.
Well, it was designed for the terminal, try the webconsole version here: https://rpigab.gitlab.io/solitaire-cli/
Source: https://gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli
First time I've played any game through the end just because I wanted to see an ad! It's really well made, gotta confess I went the CLI route because I don't know how to design GUIs with moving parts. Also, I wanted to play my game with controls tailored for the keyboard layout (ASDFGHJ keys control the columns if using QWERTY).
Thanks! I like the rewind feature. One of my key frustrations with the game solved!
That's long been my favorite Android version of klondike too.
But my favorite favorite remains the old Windows 95 Solitaire. I keep a copy around even on Linux through wine to play sometimes on PC. The main reason? I still love the ending animation of all the cards springing down without clearing the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uev21NTzom8 I don't understand why no other version seems to want to implement this ending animation, it's the best one of all time.
If anyone is using iOS, please consider our app [0]. It only has banner ads at the bottom that does not block game play.
Other features include history of all your plays, statistics, and ability to play older hands again.
Another detail that might be relevant to HN audience is that it is built using 100% SwiftUI.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-solitaire-app/id1613070030...
This is why I play it with actual physical cards. I learned it as kid so partly it's a comfort ritual, and partly the tactile interaction is very soothing.
It also "forces" you to keep playing when it gets tough, as a complete shuffle plus new setup isn't just a simple click away. It's also nice to get off the screen for a while.
I recently bought a smaller deck of cards, like half or three quarters of the size of a normal deck or so. Makes it easier to play without needing a huge table.
One nice side benefit of DNS-level adblocking (pi-hole, etc) is that a lot of mobile games never end up showing ads. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in particular I play a euchre game on my phone that frequently asks me to "pay X to play with no ads" and every time I think "What ads?"
That said, sometimes I pay to support the developer if I like the game. Sucks when a game I like doesn't offer the "remove ads" option.
Was looking for this on iPhone as well some weeks ago, and came across a Solitaire that is included in Apple Arcade that works really well, doesn't have any ads or other distractions, just plain Solitaire.
And another bonus is that Balatro (which the submission author created) is included in Apple Arcade too, which was the original reason I got Arcade.
Apple Arcade is great for avoiding all the adware and in-app payment crap.
This is the one I use too. I like how many variants it has as well.
> Unfortunately, many solitaire phone apps are filled with ads, slow, or have clunky controls
Here's one written in C# and compiled to WebAssembly:
https://solitaire.xaml.live/
Source code:
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Solitaire
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>It’s now been over a year since launch and I am still playing Balatro almost daily. I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I think this is really important, especially for games. Play the game you make!
There's a fair number of games that I've played where the developer clearly has not sat down and played through the game as a player would. No skips, no custom developer-only starts or features, no rushing through sections "because I know what happens", etc. To be fair, though, these are often below $5 games on Steam, so I'm sure a chunk of them are cash grabs rather than an honest attempt at making a successful game.
The story of the Hotline Miami 2 devs comes to mind where they mentioned that they play tested the game at half speed a lot of the times, which, including many other factors, contributes to the game being way harder than the first part.
See: https://youtu.be/IcgmmBEEHsk?t=1427
Reminds me of Miyazaki from FromSoft who said he doesn't play his own games.
No, he said he doesn't play them AFTER they release. But he plays them constantly when they're in development. One of the difficulty rules at FromSoft is that each boss and area has to be beatable by Miyazaki (which he said is a good baseline, because he likes challenge but doesn't consider himself good at games).
I wonder who he does consider good at games. FromSoft games are so hard that Dark Souls is a synonym for "really hard game". If someone can beat one of those games, I think it's fair to say they are good at games.
My understanding is he uses AI summons/etc so he's not one of the git gud crowd who believes if you don't beat it straight you suck.
I checked and you are right. Thanks for the correction.
It would be truly impressive if he was able to direct the development of Souls games into what they are without actually playing them.
He would not be able to beat the first boss probably
He's beaten nameless king, pre-nerf radahn, melania etc.
"To force players to get out of their comfort zone and explore the design of the game in a way they might not if this were a fully unguided gaming experience."
It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing draw poker in an attempt to build different hands based on your strategy.
I mean, that might be the intent on paper, but when I was going through a game like Dead Cells, I still had specific weapons or layouts that I was especially effective with--and in practice that just meant that if I didn't manage to get my favorite bat or nun-chuck weapons to drop, there was a good chance I wasn't going to be able to complete that run.
Dead Cells's "Custom Mode" lets you eliminate loads of objects from the set offered, making it much more likely for you to get weapons you want.
It's somewhat unique among the roguelites I've seen in not only offering this but also treating it as valid play: any wins/achievements in this mode (e.g. more BC) will unlock properly.
So, no need to put up with Spartan Sandals ever again!
Non-twitch based roguelites make it somewhat easier to learn and deploy those alternate strategies in my experience because you can read a bit of a clue online, think about it, and then play through a round slowly and thoughtfully. In an action game, you know, you pick up the sickle weapon for the first time and you may have literally seconds of experience with it before you die.
I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.
Yep. Enter The Gungeon is my personal favourite among roguelites but it's punishingly hard to get the hang of, and the huge number of weapons makes it quite likely that you'll only get semi-decent guns for an entire run – even when you're playing as the Gunslinger, who activates all synergies automatically.
The upside of putting in the time is that when you get good, it feels fantastic.
If you haven't tried it, I'd recommend Dead Cells. Yes, it's twitchy action, but it's easier than Gungeon to get good at, and the parkour-like flow looks and feels wonderful from quite early on. TBH it's a better game than Gungeon in most respects.
Balatro is the only game where my score has maxed out the value of a double precision floating point number. And this isn't some crazy speedrunning strategy, it's very achievable for normal players. It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
If you want the numbers to go even more up, the Talisman mod reworks everything to use BigInts for practically unlimited number go up potential. It's mainly intended to be paired with other mods like Cryptid which add obscenely overpowered cards, but Talisman can be used on its own if you just want to attempt the normally unwinnable ante 39 and beyond in vanilla.
Wow you can do that in a mod? Crazy. I wondered if localthunk would do this or if it was actually kind of nice for the game to have a "kill screen" ending like the old arcade games.
The game is entirely written in Lua (on top of Love2D) so it's pretty malleable.
There’s a very active modding scene: https://github.com/jie65535/awesome-balatro
> It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
More than Universal Paperclips?
Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once.
It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"
The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.
It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.
The "time boxing" is coming to be one of my favorite aspects of the roguelite genre. It's a nice structure for a combination of a deep and compelling game, that opens up at a reasonable speed, but also doesn't call for 80 hours to "finish" it. I like JRPGs but even so they quite often overstay their welcome. Death may wipe nearly all your progress but you can easily try again in another timebox.
(I played some of the classic Roguelikes, and spent a lot of time with Angband, but that was one of their problems... winning still took many hours, could easily be dozens, and so death became very scary. They were on to something, but the modern rebalancing of "hand it all out more quickly, and resolve the game in an hour or two and let them come back" seems a much more practical approach in a lot of ways.)
I never played Angband but got into the closely related Sil. Totally agree on your characterization (and a fan of your HN posts for well over a decade).
It really does work that way. It’s a perfect game if you have ~25 minutes to kill. It’s fairly complex, but doesn’t really require player to keep much information between runs. I hate going back to a game after a few weeks only to discover that I no longer remember how to play it.
> 25 minutes
Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).
As you go up the antes, the number of viable strategies decreases, until it narrows down to just one or two a number of antes quite a ways before the "end".
IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.
Different people play at different speeds. And some builds require more thought than others. I find that it takes about half an hour on average for me to win a run (reach ante 9).
Nah, it's pretty common for runs to take that long, especially if you're going into Endless. Some of the top Balatro streamers I watch will frequently have runs that take that long (or longer).
It does help to increase the game speed. I've got mine up to max speed (but I played it at normal speed for quite awhile, while I got used to the mechanics).
I thought I was the only one with this problem.
I can still remember how to play the original Doom after all these years (and where all the secrets are!) but the modern editions have so many controls and weapon modes that if I don't play it for a month I don't remember how anything works.
> My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day. I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way.
I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.
I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.
Sorry in advance if it's too off-topic, but if you want to play the Windows 2000 Solitaire I have it kind of working in my web-based emulator here:
https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/run.html?exe=sol.exe&dir=...
I bought Belatro and Zachtronics solitaire a few weeks ago, more or less on impulse. The Zachtronics was disappointing primarily because the UI is too small on my iPhone, and I have old eyes. Belatro is great.
I'm something of a Solitaire addict. In addition to Belatro, the Microsoft Solitaire Collection is the only game on my iPhone, and I happily pay Microsoft $10 a year because the design is the most comfortable for me. Klondike soothes me like nothing else, but it's nice to be able to put a little variety in the game for me with FreeCell, Pyramid or TriPeaks (I'm not a Spider fan).
You should try out FlipFlop solitaire by Zach Gage if you haven't already, definitely a fun spin on the solitaire concept and the game plays very smoothly.
lovely comment, it is spelled balatro by the way.
Interesting to see this here. I've commented a few times on HN about recently getting into card games (e.g. various solitaire games, gin rummy, presidents, spades, trash...etc) and domino games. It's a lot of fun, social (even solitaire as we teach each other new versions), and mentally engaging. There's no screen and it all just feels less wasteful in some weird way.
Board game night would do the same thing, but there's something beautiful about how much variety you can get out of a single deck of cards or some double-six dominos. There's no setup or 50 page rulebook required either. Most card games I just watch a YouTube video and then just remember how to play for years.
What you're looking for is Bridge. THAT is a card game you can teach someone the basics of in an evening, and still be learning more 3 decades later.
Lol. I tried. Went to several classes and somehow still never learned to play. I can't tell if all the structure and complexity is worth the extra headache compared to games like Spades or other bidding/trick games. I have heard that it's supposedly by far the best there is though, so perhaps I should try again. I do play Texas 42, which is kind of like bridge with dominos. It's wildly popular in Texas, but hasn't reached much further. There's a lot of strategy to the bidding, but I'm not sure how closely it ranks to Bridge.
The best is often to have one player who knows some of the conventions, and the rest know nothing, and all learn to play together.
Whist is basically no-bid bridge, which can be fun, too.
When I was a kid, if I couldn't be on the computer for whatever reason I'd occupy myself with a pack of cards. I'd play solitaire (Klondike) over and over. I would vary the draw count and see how that affected the game. I'd sort the cards beforehand and see if that made it any easier or harder to win. I'd try to find the optimal order the cards would have to be in before dealing for the game to be won in the least number of steps. Ultimately I figured Solitaire was just a roundabout way of sorting a deck of cards and started messing with other sorting methods. I still, every time I see a pack of cards, feel that urge to just sort and sort and sort. It wasn't even "fun", I was just so desperate for mental stimulation.
Anyways, love Balatro!
This game is freaking addicting. I had to uninstall it.
It was for me too, but only for about a month or so. Once I got 19 of 20 achievements (and the last one is nigh-impossible), I lost interest, and haven't played it since. (Though this post is tempting me to try a game or two with a different non-addicted attitude!)
This is in stark contrast with Slay the Spire, which I've been playing compulsively since 2019.
Great read, I always love reading about the thoughts and intentions behind game design.
> I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I do see the relaxing component of the game once you’ve got the hang of it and are playing on white stake. But I do feel like the game encourages you to take on more difficult/frustrating stakes and decks, so for someone working on gold stake for the black deck for example, it would absolutely not be something to play before bed (unless you’re in the mood to cry yourself to sleep)
This inspired me to play a round of Klondike for the first time in many years. Pretty fun! Probably slightly healthier than scrolling social media.
Reading this makes me sad actually, because I grew up on windows machines (starting with windows 3.1) and have so many memories of Solitaire that came shipped with windows. The deck variations, the little and big effects (like winning!) I played it so much as a grade schooler. Now that mac is so ubiquitous, most kids wont ever know the simple pleasure of playing solitaire.
Forget Mac, people, kids play on their phones first. And yeah, it's far from the offline simple please that is solitaire. I wonder what they'll say when they reach this stage of life. Today's popular things seem soulless to me, but I'm sure they are connecting to it (and to things I don't know about) just the same as I did back then.
Don't worry, Windows is still far, far more ubiquitous. The bigger reason people don't play solitaire as much as they used to is that it is no longer the only game installed on their PC.
So many people in the 90s learned solitaire playing it on a work from a lack of other options on their work PC. Now with the so many games on the web and your smartphone, you might not even try it.
People give Microsoft a lot of shit, but including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
> including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
Brillant, sure, but not completely sure it was controversial or bold, they have stated that it was primarily included in Windows 3.0 to help people get used to the new paradigms (for Windows) of the mouse and drag and drop, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire
> People give Microsoft a lot of shit
Well they didn't help themselves by shoving ads and subscriptions in all of those games : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire_Collection...
Windows Solitaire mostly died because Microsoft strangled it with microtransactions and ads during the Windows 8 days.
What went from a simple minigame you could fire up at any time got transformed into this monstrosity that kept forcing ads on you, urging you to buy premium versions, adding "engagement" nonsense (daily missions) and selling you back the same features that came free in the Windows 7 version.
ive always seen the reason MS included solitaire and minesweeper was to teach people how to use a mouse and a gui.
I can remember even in the early 2000s when we started installing PCs instead of green screen terminals at different locations having employees play solitaire as a way to get them used to their new computers and learning how to use a mouse.
What a thoughtful post. I think there is a narrative that localthunk is a "shitty programmer" (which he might very well be), but that by extension, it also means that he just got lucky and bumblefucked his way into massive success - almost as though he didn't know any better.
A post like this dispels that narrative - he clearly put a ton of thought into the design of that game and was incredibly intentional about where he wanted it to go.
In what quarters is that narrative? Surely one only has to play Balatro for an hour or two to understand the incredible game design effort that underpins it all, which is brought so vibrantly to life by the music, art, animations, and all the rest of it.
I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.
People that mention this are usually referring to this chunk of the source code: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/s/KmEWRILR1q
My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it takes to make a game like Balatro by yourself. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. But so is calling LocalThunk a “shitty programmer” over some questionable if-else logic.
People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.
It's verbose and could be simplified, but also looks like something you write once and never look at again. If it works it makes no sense to spend any more time on it.
Yeah, working on a game myself and ... sometimes you just gotta do stuff like that.
Working on a game solo requires juggling several wildly different disciplines at the same time. Sometimes you're in "game designer" mode, you need to fix a bug or add a feature, and you bonk in the caveman thing that obviously works.
Solo gamedev is basically the "startups should accumulate technical debt" meme on steroids. As long as you can understand the code, nobody cares about how it looks. Only how the game plays.
He clearly comes across as a conscious game designer as well. And programming doesn't need to be good on today's machines. Many of the indie successes are shit software, like Minecraft, Valheim, Cities Skylines, Project Zomboid, and I'm sure there's many others. Great product design and PR are infinitely more important than software quality.
I have never heard that assertion, I don’t know how anyone can play Balatro and not feel that it is a deeply intentional creation. I think localthunk would be the first to tell you they got lucky with how it found an audience outside of themselves, but everything in the game oozes polish and intention.
The assertions are more around code quality. Game design is wonderful.
Apparently there are places where the code is like a thousand lines of if card_name then effect.
For a project with lots of variation being maintained by a single person that’s totally fine.
Bad code can have a really high cognitive load to maintain. Just to illustrate what bad means, take a look at this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/1cb6rca/...
I can see that having even bits of modification impacts lots of lines, where if written just a bit more saner, it could impact just a few.
Of course everyone is absolutely free to do the things however they want on their project. It's just that bad code, and bad choices bite back sometimes really badly. Project Zomboid is built in LUA for example, and it shows, it's a horrorshow not just to play, but to develop it as well. Their programmers spend a lot of time with just refactoring things. Besides functionality, maintainability should be a huge focus in my experience, so that the devs don't hate life if they have to touch the code again.
The example you post is out of context and maybe a bit overly verbose but again it’s one guy maintaining it and is perfectly readable. Does anyone really struggle to understand that?
I’m back working on a twenty plus year old codebase (and game) that’s ~3 millions loc and would kill for something simple like that rather than some of the overabstracted crimes lurking within.
Yeah, without context criticism of this code is silly.
What if this wasn't always how cards worked? What if the mapping was (at one point in development) not straightforward? Or localthunk had some ideas and wanted to leave the door open to a more complex mapping scheme?
Yep, there are days I yearn for just having a super long set of if statements, vs the over-engineered messes that I deal with on a daily basis.
So many codebases end up impenetrable in the pursuit of fancy design patterns...
I think that too fancy code is just as bad as the original if-else spaghetti, but then even worse, because the patterns are abstract now as well.
Undertale's code base is apparently no better. For games I don't think code quality is nearly as paramount; there's not a whole lot of maintenance going on there, though this doesn't apply to live service games.
Even if the underlying code is "bad", who cares? There are far more important skills in indie game development then programming ability. I'd much rather play an interesting, well-designed game with a few bugs and messy code over a well-programmed but boring game.
It's always interesting to drop into these posts, especially when they are at the top of the HN list,
and have zero context. Who is this person? What is localthunk? What is "Balatro"?
A reminder there are subpopulations online within which <things> are well known and active references.
And others, like mine, where <things> have not once come up.
I think like podcasts, mobile games are a thing that is just totally invisible to me and <my circle>.
There are a lot of things I do not think are good uses of AI, but dropping into circles you are not apart of and getting your bearings is one of my favorite use cases.
The other day my friends were talking about a "nemesis mechanic" in a game that was good but patented and never used? I asked GPT about it because I just wanted a short summary of what it was and why it was cool.
It looks like it would have worked here too:
```If you spent as long reading search results for "Balatro" as you did writing this comment, you would have enough context to understand what localthunk and balatro are.
I find your musing on the topic interesting, if only as a reminder that people have largely forgotten to help themselves to the free information that surrounds us.
I don't think that was his point. He wasn't asking specifically what Balatro was. He just marvels at the fact that there are so many niche interests out there that their very existence is unknown to him.
Your statement about people having forgotten how to help themselves to information is borderline insulting. A little like sending somebody a "let me google that for you" link.
Or maybe I've misunderstood what you meant.
Maybe you have.
Either way, I don't feel a conversation with you is going to be productive.
Have a nice day! (Or don't, I'm not your boss)
YouTube is such a great, single-source, area for this. It's wild how many 10m+ subscriber youtube channels that I've never even heard of. So much variety in the world :)
TLDR: Balatro is a roguelike card game where in you make poker hands to score points. You can enhance cards and get jokers that have more effects.
It wont a ton of awards this past year (it's just about a year old) and was incredibly well received.
Localthunk is the developer. I believe he did everything for the PC version himself (except maybe a single joker's art). He has a publisher that helped port to pretty much every other platform you can think of.
The soundtrack was also commissioned.
> I think that’s one of the reasons why there isn’t a player character, health, or classic ‘enemies’ in the game as well.
This was the thing I found most interesting when I started playing the game, because it's so different from almost all games these days (especially roguelikes). I initially found it off-putting (part of me wanted more context for what was happening), but the more I played the more it made sense. And his comparison to Solitaire really drives that home.
But also, despite the lack of a character or enemies, the game has a huge amount of character, which I think was critical for its success.
In terms of the low stakes feel, I think calling it a “boss blind” is really the only thing that I could possibly point to critically.
It’s amazing how that one word can change the entire vibe. It evokes a much more serious feel to it for me. Not sure what I’d call it, but I wonder if a different word would suddenly alter the whole vibe just a bit more towards that stated goal in the first paragraph.
honestly without context for what this blog is for, or a link to the things it references (klondike/solitaire?) it's hard to want to read the full thing
Don't fade in text on scroll. Just let the page scroll.