The Balatro Timeline
It’s been approximately 3 years since I began work on Balatro - and in that time I have personally documented almost nothing about the journey. This is something that has bothered me since the game launched. I am constantly forgetting major moments in development or milestones. It’s about time I start writing down what happened, I say better late than never!
This is an account of everything related to Balatro development in chronological order, up to and including the launch day. This should tell the story but more importantly it will serve as a source of truth for me when I look back on this time in a few years to recall the details correctly. I already notice talking to friends, players, and media that I contradict myself on some of the details from time to time. I’ll try and keep this up to date as I remember more about what happened.
December 13th, 2021
This is the creation date for template, a folder in my Learning/Lua/ directory. This is the creation of the project that would eventually become Balatro.
I had saved up about 3 weeks of vacation time from my IT job, and since they didn’t allow people to accrue vacation year over year I just took off a bunch of time in December to work on some kind of project. At the very beginning of this time off I was working on a game called Autohike. I had been working on this game for a few months at this point but I wasn’t really feeling it anymore, so very early into my vacation I pivoted to cleaning up the code I had created and making a template for a new game.
The initial idea on Dec 13th was to create an online multiplayer version of Big Cheat, a game that a few friends and I had invented many years prior and played a ton based on the card games Big 2 and Cheat.
This whole first week was mostly me trying to upgrade the engine I built with Autohike to better fit a card game.
December 20th, 2021
This is the creation date for CardGame, my current production working folder for all Balatro source code. I never bothered changing the name.
I remember spending a long time making custom pixel art for the red deck back and all the playing cards. It was the first time I had tried making proper pixel art.
End of December 2021
I had a very weird prototype. There were no Jokers, there were no blinds to select, the upgrade system consisted of randomly choosing a card from the deck and slapping a weird ‘enhancement’ on it. But it definitely had the bones of Balatro at this point, so it was pretty clear that I abandoned the online Big Cheat idea immediately.
The game had the CHIP X MULT mechanic already. I really don’t know where this idea came from but it seemed very natural for a scoring system. Earlier in December I was watching videos of Luck Be a Landlord from Northernlion and that whole score attack concept really fuelled the direction I wanted to go with this game from this point onward.
I also made a very conscious effort not to play any more roguelike games starting now. 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.
I started sharing progress with a few of my friends, but no builds were shared yet.
January 2022
My vacation is over, but I am now fully immersed and obsessed. This is my favourite feeling in the world. When I was back in University I would routinely stay up until the wee hours of the morning working on my weird game projects and greet my parents while they made their morning coffee. I got back into this groove and starting in January I was hooked.
Evenings and weekends were Joker Poker time (my working title for Balatro, likely decided on early this month).
I iterate through some weird versions of the game, 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)
February 2022
I started adding Jokers to the game. I also was temporarily working remotely out of province for a few months starting at this time and found that my Balatro dev time took a pretty big hit.
I started adding different boss blinds to the game.
March 2022
Early March marked an important event in the history of Balatro, and I wanted to describe why things happened the way they did. I stopped working on the project entirely.
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.
That leads us to…
May 2022
We are so back. This is the last month I am away from home but I start carving out my evenings and weekends to work on Joker Poker again.
My brain is teeming with ideas, I’m so excited about the game again, and I have a ton of momentum.
I create (and quickly scrap) a bunch of new systems to test, such as a separate currency for rerolls outside of $, and 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
It is during this burst of productivity that I first start thinking about a possible Steam release of the game. This was the first time in my then 8 years of game development that I had even considered publicly releasing a game I had made. Normally they just end up going to a couple of friends, but honestly the main purpose of my games wasn’t for them to be consumed, but rather for them just to be made.
Another factor me starting to consider a Steam launch was that my partner was almost finished her PhD and the writing was on the wall that we may be moving out of province for good as she looked for a job. If this was the case, I would have to quit my job and look for work. I thought why not try and get a game developer job somewhere? To accomplish that, I thought having a Steam game in my portfolio would be a big benefit.
I really didn’t have any commercial aspirations at this time. All I knew about Steam is that there were about a million games on there and that very few could realistically make a living, so I didn’t think it was possible to consider it.
It was in during this month that my eventual developer name - LocalThunk - was incepted.
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.
June 2022
Still working on the game (details of what exactly I was adding at this point are fuzzy). I think by this time Joker Poker has economy, a bunch of Jokers, and generally resembles the current version of Balatro.
I share a new version of the game with some friends.
August 2022
One of those friends gets back to me months later with very high praise. Unexpectedly high. He mentions that he has played the beta for dozens of hours.
In all my years of sharing projects with friends I had never received feedback like that. I couldn’t believe it, and it really pushed me over the edge to fully flesh out this idea. It was really great knowing that this game was actually being enjoyed by someone I know, and I wanted to prove to him, my other friends, my partner, my family, and myself that I could make something really fun and interesting.
At this point I started really increasing scope. More Jokers, Controller support, touch support, Jimbo the cheeky tutorial character, a soundtrack, proper sound effects, special editions for cards, and way more got added to the docket. I felt like scope creep incarnate, and it was amazing.
January 2023
As anticipated, my partner got a really great job in a different province and I quit my job to move there with her. I was really excited for this new chapter in our lives, and I also decided to not look for work for the next 3-6 months and develop Joker Poker full time.
It was the perfect opportunity to work as a game dev full time (even if for free) and I didn’t know if I would ever have the chance again. I had some money saved up, so starting this month I really leaned into it.
February 2023
I took a brief vacation to surf in California with some friends. I showed them the new build I had been working on - a version that would end up on Steam within a few months. This version now had Vouchers!
March 2023
This month I contacted Luis Clemente on the freelance website Fiverr and he delivered an absolutely amazing soundtrack for Joker Poker. Really knocked it out of the park. I was very nervous about this because it was (at the time) the only money I had spent or planned to spend on the game.
I also showed the game to some friends during a discord call, and one friend made the suggestion that there should be a flaming effect on your score if you get a really good hand. I hated the idea at first, but I sat with it for a while and knew I was wrong. That flaming score effect really fit perfectly with the game I was trying to create. Sure glad I listened to him!
I workshopped a list of ~20 names for the game. I saw that the game ‘Joker Poker’ was already an app on the app store, but beyond that it felt just a bit too silly for the vibe I was shooting for. I sent this list of new names to my friends and got all of their feedback. Balatro was among that list but nobody picked it. Something about it really stuck with me so I just went with it.
April 2023
I started creating store assets this month. I created a trailer, got my screenshots, and paid the very scary $100 Steam fee to upload a game. I also had a pretty massive code refactor at this point.
The name is officially Balatro.
I was pretty overwhelmed by Steam, just starting to look into things like how to launch an indie game? was really freaking me out. There are so many games released on Steam every day and so much noise about what you should and shouldn’t do, what type of game you should make, what method you should use to market it. It was a real shock to me that even though I had this game that I poured so much time into that it didn’t really seem to matter. I didn’t think this game would sell any copies before this and my initial research into Steam reinforced that idea to me.
May 2023
I downloaded Slay the Spire and played it for the first time. Holy shit. now that is a game.
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).
In late May, I uploaded the first public Beta build to Steam, set my store page live, and saw exactly what I expected to happen happened: nothing. The fact that I wasn’t anticipating any fanfare probably saved me some heartache because I didn’t end up feeling dejected from the very tepid response my free Beta was getting from players.
Feedback started coming in from the Beta players. This marks the beginning of a more player-focused development strategy I would adhere to instead of just listening to my gut all the time.
By end of May, Balatro had 48 wishlists on Steam
Early June 2023
This is about the time when Balatro stopped being a pure hobby for me.
YouTubers started covering the game. It was mostly small and indie game specific channels, but the attention definitely started growing over time. The Discord server I had made for feedback about the game started taking up more of my time. However, at this time there was nothing to indicate that the game was going to start popping off.
Even so - I started really thinking about the commercial viability of the game. Could I actually make some money from this? I saw a glimmer of a possibility that this might turn into something.
My partner and I went on a big backcountry canoe trip for a few days. During this trip we talked about the future of this game and what it meant for my work. Even with the mild momentum I was ready to move on, and since back in January I told her this would be at most 6 months I felt that I shouldn’t push it too much longer. It had already been a year and a half of dev at this point.
I prepared to launch the game in 2 weeks. The release date went live on my Steam page, and I started thinking about moving on to looking for a job again and getting back into normal software/IT work.
I got a DM on twitter from a scout at Playstack, my eventual publisher. I was super excited but this also complicated things. This was a very tumultuous time in the history of the game because I was in limbo between nothing will come of this game and I want to move on with my life and what if I could do this as a job?
By June 10th, Balatro had 183 wishlists on Steam
Mid June 2023
Dan Gheesling plays Balatro on his stream. This is a massive streamer for my game (and a great guy!), and it starts making my wishlist numbers spike.
Other medium sized Youtubers and streamers start playing the game, it is building momentum. At this point the game was spreading entirely from word of mouth. I had posted a few things on Reddit and Twitter but really nothing that ever gained meaningful traction; now the game had inertia by itself.
It becomes clear that I should pursue the game a little further. I am approached by a few different publishers around now. I get some really great support and advice from my parents about everything going on. I strongly consider going it alone, but I also know that I need some help with all the public facing things, marketing, possible porting and just navigating this new thing I knew nothing about.
I hire a lawyer to help me with all the contract negotiations, help me set up a business, and I decide to sign with Playstack after speaking to studios that have worked with them in the past. They can replace whatever salary I would have made from an IT job, so this is my job now!
While this was a very exciting time, it was also incredibly stressful. I’m not used to dealing with so many people, and I felt pressure from so many different directions that I wasn’t expecting.
I created a demo version of the game that only lasted 50 rounds after my free Beta tester queue started getting bigger. At this point I had 300 beta testers for the full game and didn’t really need any more. This demo strategy wasn’t the best idea, but it allowed people to see what Balatro was all about without just getting the full game for free. The demo was getting around 10-20 concurrent players, which was really mind blowing for me at the time.
By end of June, Balatro had 2440 wishlists on Steam
July 2023
I release big updates around this time for the playtesters. I add the skip tag system, and I totally revamp the tutorial to basically what it is today.
The trajectory for the game appears at this time to be big enough for me to replace my income for a year at least. This was so exciting to me, I hadn’t really thought about it before because I was doing this work on my weekends and during my evenings anyway.
After a bunch of negotiations I finally sign a publishing deal with Playstack. I won’t go too far into whether or not people should or shouldn’t have a publisher, but for me at this time it was crucial that I have some publishing help. They outlined a very sensible release plan for the game (one that we adhered to almost exactly until launch in Feb 2024) and they really expanded the audience a ton with support for more languages and porting on day 1 for every major console.
My demo is getting some attention from streamers still, but one day in mid July, Northernlion was pitched the game on his stream from Dan Gheesling and ended up playing it that same day. I was in the chat watching, totally dumbfounded, that someone I watched on Twitch/YouTube for over a decade at that point was playing my game. I text all my friends about it, they are all shocked as well. At the time I was more concerned about a potential crash or something going horribly wrong but I did also try to just sit, watch, and enjoy the surreal moment.
Northernlion was playing the 50 round demo version - and after he quickly ran through all 50 rounds I got his attention and gave him a key to play the full beta version. I think some people weren’t super fond of this because he got special treatment - but honestly I was more in fan mode than dev mode. Looking back I’m glad I gave him the key - that was a massive moment for my game and even though it was tricky to navigate.
Playstack and I decide that we should take down the demo and come up with a better strategy than limiting players to 50 rounds
By end of July, Balatro had 28,661 wishlists on Steam
August 2023
The new demo plan is in place, and most of August is me preparing for a September release of this demo. The plan now is to make the demo content limited instead of round limited. This means that players can play as much as they want, which is much more sensible.
The demo should be ready a couple weeks before the Fall 2023 Next Fest in October. Next Fest is a festival set up by Steam to shine a spotlight on upcoming games for the platform. While we weren’t planning on adding Balatro as an official entry in the October 2023 Next Fest - we thought having a demo available at the same time as the festival might gather some incidental attention.
This is when my sleep and heart started having issues. I have talked about this a tiny bit in the past, but I really struggled with my physical and mental health from this time onward all the way up to launch. This was entirely because of the stress around dealing with the public, players, and the pressure to get everything done before February 2024.
We start exploring the feasibility of porting the game to different platforms. I won’t talk about this much more because of the agreements around those platforms, but suffice it to say this ended up being a very large portion of my work time over the coming months
By end of August, Balatro had 38,011 wishlists on Steam
September 2023
I start converting all the text in the game to an external english file to facilitate localization to other languages. I didn’t plan on having this game translated when it was a hobby so I had to do this all after the fact. It didn’t end up being too horrible, just some rework that I could have saved if I knew I was doing this from the beginning.
Near the end of September, I launch the new demo on Steam. People generally really like it! I try and make some tweaks based on player feedback, but it’s clear this approach is much better than limiting players to 50 rounds.
The last few months I have been very involved in the Balatro Discord server. I try and chat with players all the time, and I try to take their criticisms seriously. I feel like the demo and beta players knew more about how to play the game properly than I did, so I found it was really important to listen to what they had to say about the game in order to properly assess what I need to change or tweak for balance.
By the time the September demo is live, there are tons of players chatting in the Discord server all the time. I feel pretty overwhelmed by it all but I feel like I need to interact with them constantly. I didn’t want to waste the opportunity, and we also chatted a lot about general design things that players might be interested to see in the full 1.0 version of the game.
By end of September, Balatro had 49,791 wishlists on Steam
October 2023
Next Fest goes live early in the month, and as anticipated we do catch a lot of attention for having a demo live at the same time. We get pretty good coverage in general around this time from YouTubers, streamers, and even some media.
We originally planned on taking the demo down a week or so after the Next Fest ended, but so many people kept playing it that we decided to keep that version of the demo live for quite a while longer.
I started finalizing the content plan for the 1.0 version of the game. The biggest addition is the inclusion of a sort of ‘ascension’ system. This is from Slay the Spire (see? Told you I’d steal from it) but I think it was a super cool way to add difficulty and give players a sort of checklist to work through.
I also had a meeting with Playstack this month where I described to them the final content in the game, including ‘120 Jokers’. 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.
I can’t remember if it was now or in September, but we enlist the help of Maarten De Meyer to help with our porting efforts. Maarten was absolutely instrumental in getting Balatro on every platform, and frankly he’s a Love2D wizard.
My sleep and my heart are getting worse. Every few nights I need to sleep sitting upright on the couch because sleeping while lying down kept getting interrupted by my heart. I stupidly thought that I couldn’t handle going to the doctor while dealing with all the dev and business stuff swirling around at the time. I felt totally overwhelmed.
By end of October, Balatro had 77,380 wishlists on Steam
November 2023
We keep the demo up for the entire month of November since our player numbers are still pretty high. More of the same from previous months. This is basically crunch time, so for the next couple months I’m just working on finishing everything in my plan.
The game is to be launched right after the following Next Fest scheduled for February 2024. This means that we want a new version of the demo with slightly different content to be available for that Next Fest, so I am working on that on the side.
Additionally, we have an idea to make an invitational tournament for streamers with an early build of this new version of the demo. This is scheduled to happen some time in late January 2024.
By end of November, Balatro had 87,280 wishlists on Steam
December 2023
More of the same. By this time it’s clear we can launch on every platform thanks to monumental effort by both Maarten and his wizardry and also a massive amount of optimization to my code base that I had worked on over the previous months.
We decide to take down the demo by the end of December because we want some breathing room before we launch the next iteration
By end of December, Balatro had 94,212 wishlists on Steam
January 2024
My heart is really bothering me. I routinely can’t sleep until the sun comes up, and my mental health is really suffering. I love working on the game but working on it so publicly and with such an intensity for so long is really catching up with me.
One night I am watching the movie The Abyss with my partner and suddenly I get tunnel vision, my heart is absolutely pounding and I feel like something is seriously wrong. I sit on the couch for a while, totally freaked out. I’m really scared.
I call my doctor and see him the next morning for an appointment. He assures me that this wasn’t a heart attack or heart failure but an anxiety attack. I am not normally an anxious person and have never had issues with this in the past but I think the intense stress for such a long time has done quite a bit of damage.
He asks me if my work has been stressful lately. I don’t even know how to explain.
January 19th is the invitational tournament. We have 6 streamers participate. This was actually a really great moment for me to sit back and watch the fruits of my labour for once - not work on the game and just enjoy.
My partner and I order sushi, sit down and watch the multi-stream broadcast by MurphyObv playing a hilarious character. It was probably my favourite moment of the entire pre-launch phase of the game. Just really wonderful to see this silly game come together for a moment and watch a bunch of people participate like a community.
Hafu wins, because of course she does. She’s Hafu!
We announce the launch date of the game; February 20th
By end of January, Balatro had 114,977 wishlists on Steam
February 2024
I was still working on implementing stuff in the game in February believe it or not. I was in super crunch mode.
I had a private server made a little while earlier with testers from the Balatro community that I felt exhibited an exceptional ability to give feedback, understand the vision of the game, and analyze the flaws with it. I think this was instrumental in making sure that the 1.0 version of the game really started fun out the gate. I chatted with them a ton this month.
I knew there would be tweaks after launch but this was important to ensure that something catastrophic didn’t happen.
We have a really strong Next Fest. We get a ton of coverage from streamers, YouTubers, and media yet again. Balatro is one of the most played games of the festival.
I start properly playing the game myself about a week before launch - and it’s actually fun. I have a pretty emotional moment where I feel like I did the thing I set out to do. Finally. I made the fun game I wanted to make.
We have an absurd amount of momentum leading up to launch day, far more than what anyone was expecting.
February 19th rolls around. The 19th is the review embargo day, and Playstack did a truly exceptional job getting this game in the hands of traditional media to write their reviews before launch. I didn’t know what to expect, this was a pretty weird game after all. Average ratings of 6 or 7?
The first big review is from PC Gamer: 91. Playstack and I are on a call when they break the news to me, and I can tell they are pretty shocked. I am shocked. That rating doesn’t make any sense.
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.
By launch day, Balatro has 208,401 wishlists on Steam
February 20th, 8am PST is when the game is supposed to go live across all platforms. We launch it 15 minutes early. I cannot describe to you how nervous I am that I’ll be patching like a madman not only all day, but all month. I told my partner that I won’t be making any plans until the end of March because I fully anticipated the sky to fall and for me to be working 24/7 to fix the inevitable disaster.
To my shock - nothing goes wrong. People love the game, they’re having a great time. I think there may have been some small bugs but definitely nothing massive, nothing like what I was anticipating. Streamers are playing it, media is writing about it. I have so many texts from friends and family. It is the most surreal day of my life.
The launch is 10-20 times larger than we were anticipating.
One of the moments that sticks out to me is the moment I first checked the Steam page for sales. I checked this page for the first time a couple hours after launch almost on a whim, not expecting to see any sales information yet, and we had already sold 50,000 copies on Steam. The numbers on that page made no sense. This was meant for just a few of my friends and yet somehow all these strangers chose to buy it. The revenue on that page after just a couple hours was over $600,000, far more money than I’ve made in my entire life. By the end of launch day, Balatro has sold 119,000 units on Steam alone.
The other moment from that day that sticks out is later that day when my partner got home from work. She had been following along all day and struggling to get any work done, and when she got home she gave me a great big hug. I wasn’t sure I’d even survive the launch but here we were. I could not have done this without her. We ordered burgers for supper and popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
