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HIGHLIGHTS
AROUNDSQUARE
There’s one brand which has been making skill toys more and more popular around the world. Welcome to Aroundsquare.
CARD GAME HIGHLIGHT with Localthunk
The poker roguelike that has taken everyone by storm. Balatro is a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos. It’s easy to pick up and once you do, hard to let down.
Here’s how it works: You start with a hand of nine regular playing cards, then aim to create the strongest four or five-card poker hand possible – think flushes, straights, three of a kind, and the like. Your hand gets scored with each satisfying “ding!”, and you proceed to the next round. The catch? You’re only competing against yourself. Beat the initial points target, which might be a few hundred, and you advance.
But here’s where it gets intriguing: in between rounds, you can spice up your deck. Imagine adding mysterious elements like holographic, steel, or even gold card variants that offer multipliers or bonus chips. There are planet cards too, boosting the value of specific hands, tarot cards that twist the game in fascinating ways, and a host of quirky Jokers capable of completely reshaping your strategy. It’s like poker with a psychedelic twist, where bending the rules is encouraged.
With a game as popular as Balatro, you’re bound to find a plethora of interviews on the internet. Now, just imagine being the developer and answering the same questions on and on and on. So, in order to make it more entertaining for both him and you guys, I’ve tried to ask LT questions that (hopefully) no one has.
Q: What was the first game you ever fully completed (playing wise) ?
My earliest gaming memory is probably playing Midtown Madness on a Windows 98 PC when I was a kid, or watching my older brother and cousins play Diablo 1 over LAN for hours on end. Gaming has always been a pastime of mine long before I ever thought about making one.
Q: After reading through your past interviews, I was very joyful to discover you talking so passionately about coding. What kickstarted your passion for programming?
Both of my parents are in IT and they were a big influence on that part of my life. I remember sitting with my mom and trying to create a web browser in Visual Basic when I was very young. Eventually I pursued a non-software Engineering degree but fell in love with coding as a hobby outside of class, creating simulations of evolving creatures, simple games, and various projects as a creative outlet. During my final year of Engineering I decided that programming was too important for me and dropped out, then re-enrolled into Computer Science. I never regretted the
decision, and it landed me an IT job where I was still able to program in my free time.
Q: Balatro is made in Love2D. How did you discover the program? Did you make other games with it?
Iused to make all my games with SFML: a C++ wrapper for a bunch of common 2D SDL calls. I loved the low level control it afforded me and while it may not have been the most productive framework it was such a fun tool for me to learn the intricacies of game development. I played SNKRX a few years ago (Made in Love2D), so I investigated the framework and was drawn to the similar level of control without the fancy editor that you get with Unity or Unreal. I adore Love2D and I’m sure my next game will be written using it as well. Balatro is my first game in Love2D.
Q: What inspired you to start making your very first game? Can you tell me what it was about?
My first games weren’t really games, they were more simulations. I made temperature simulations using cellular automata, organism simulations where genetically distinct creatures would evolve and compete to create
species with distinct behaviour and appearance, then transitioned to making a risk-like game inspired by EUIV with my own twist (short runs, randomly generated but historically accurate countries, elevation maps, population densities, port cities). All of these games were made for me or some friends so they never saw the light of day even though I sometimes spent upwards of a year working on each one.
Q: Wow. That is so unique. Do you remember how you started making simulations in the first place?
Ithink when I was first getting into software development I really just fell in love with it, and I wanted to make interesting things. Simulations of physical phenomenon or complex systems just seemed so interesting to me so that is the direction I gravitated toward. Making a completed ‘game’ wasn’t ever a goal for me until I was already pretty far along into Balatro. That result-oriented thinking doesn’t serve me well, I am much more process-oriented, so the process of creating these interesting simulations was just as rewarding as game development is for me now.
Q: What are some of the things you like doing outside of programming?
rogramming is by far my favourite hobby, but I do enjoy some other activities in my spare time. Art has pretty much always been a part of my life. I like to create intricate ink drawings on paper and paintings or drawings of mountains. I also really love the outdoors and I’m looking forward to getting outside more this summer and carving out some weekend time to get away from game development.
Q: How did you and Playstack [the publisher] come into contact?
They reached out to me right when the game first went public, during the first demo. At the time I was about to head back to work and they gave me the ability to fully flesh this idea out without needing to worry about finding a day job. They have been amazing to work with and I know that Balatro wouldn’t be the game it is today without their expertise and help.
Q: LouisFsoundtracks has done a great job with the soundtrack. How did the two of you meet?
Icontacted him on Fiverr! When I did, the game was still just a private project so I was really nervous spending money on it, but he did such an incredible job capturing exactly what I was going for that I knew it was totally worth it. I have tried keeping in contact with him, and he is now working on a game of his own! It seems like a very interesting concept and I’m really excited to help show it off once it’s ready for the public.
Q: I love that you didn’t play any similar game to yours in order to not be influenced by their design choices. So, given that you don’t “steal like an artist”, what’s your creative process like?
Oh, I still steal like an artist all the time! Art is theft. The game is still just a remix of existing games at heart, after all. I still played some games during development but avoiding the ones that were directly adjacent to my idea seemed like a great way to feed into this hobby. The decision to avoid those games was more to allow myself to solve the problems they all solved without looking at the answers. They are such interesting design problems, I felt like most of my enjoyment from Balatro has come from learning different approaches and designs for core mechanics, how they might fit
ONE MILLION
Selling over 250.000 copies in just 72 hours, at the time of writing this, Balatro has sold over one million units worldwide and is sitting on Steam with over 28.000 overwhelmingly positive reviews. I discovered the game accidently 2 days after it was published on Steam and I thought, “Ha. This would be a great game to feature in the magazine.” Little did I know at that point just how big ‘Balatro’ was going to be.
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together, then making a bunch of mistakes along the way. I think it also helped make the game seem a bit more fresh but that was not the primary goal with the approach.
Q: Passionate people work a lot. Sometimes too much, to the point they can get burned out. What did you do to avoid this?
Ididn’t! I’m honestly just lucky I happened to survive until 1.0 release before burning out. That was a huge struggle during the last few months of development and it certainly wasn’t sustainable. I think a lot of solo devs would probably say something similar but I never really developed the habits needed to keep this hobby healthy as a career.
I’m trying to learn all those skills now, and since a few weeks before release things have been much more balanced in my life. I was working far too long and far too often because it was the only thing I wanted to do in my spare time, then suddenly it was the only thing in my spare time AND the only thing during the work day.
Q: Reading through interviews I can see that you’re a very humble and
Originally Balatro was going to be an online version of Big 2, a standard card game, for me to play with my friends during the pandemic. We used to play that game all the time in High School and University, and it seemed like a really fun challenge to create
decks
joyful person. What are some of the philosophies that have guided you throughout your life?
I’ve learned a lot about myself from Balatro, including some of the philosophies I try to live by. Growing up I was a very relaxed and often oblivious person, mostly I would just go with the flow.
Some of my core ideas as a person have been co-opted to my game development methodology; for example I constantly ask myself ‘to what end’ when I need to make a decision on anything. Dropping out of Engineering right at the end of my degree was a pretty simple decision because of this. For Balatro - a game that is primarily for me to write code in an enjoyable way and a method to express myself, saying that constantly re-aligns my thoughts ��
with code. Shortly after I started, I was inspired by some videos of “Luck Be a Landlord” to pivot the game into more of a score attack roguelike solitaire experience.
: BALATRO
with the guiding principle. It helps me ignore the ever-loudening stream of noise around the game; the criticisms, the praise, the suggestions, the news. None of that stuff is related to the original reason I opened my laptop and started making a digital card game. This game is for me, and I love that people are able to connect with it and enjoy it but ultimately, if the game doesn’t bring me joy, then to what end am I doing it?
Aside from that, I try to constantly acknowledge my bias. I am not an example to follow because I know that my story is a massive outlier. I don’t feel superior to any of my peers because of this survivorship bias, if anything I feel inferior because I am still a newcomer with a lot of bad habits to grow out of and I happened to get rewarded despite my shortcomings. It always bothered me that people experiencing success attribute so much to their actions and so little to their circumstances.
Q: Was there ever a point during development when you felt like quitting? What are some of the habits you have in order to successfully go through challenging times and overcome challenges all by yourself?
There were times when I felt like I was pushing it too far for my health but I don’t know if I ever thought about quitting. Like I said before, I didn’t have good habits around work life balance for Balatro during the last few months of development, so I don’t think I am qualified to give advice on the matter.
I have a really really hard time compartmentalising this work and I’m still working on how to do that better. As for overcoming those challenges alone, it goes back to the question ‘to what end’ am I doing this? I’m a solo dev because I enjoy pretty much every technical aspect of creating
Some of my core ideas as a person have been co-opted to my game development methodology; for example I constantly ask myself ‘to what end’ when I need to make a decision on anything “ “ LOCALTHUNK
a game, so doing it alone definitely wasn’t the hard part of this process, it was the reward. And that also doesn’t credit some of the amazing people that worked on this game in other ways or supported me even if they weren’t the ones typing the code. I leaned on people to handle the things I am not good at or the things that I don’t enjoy, like turning this game into a marketable product or public relations.
Q: It feels like your parents have always supported you in your adventures. I am curious what their thoughts were while you were making those simulations and Balatro.
They have always been very supportive! I can’t count the number of times my Dad walked into our family room at 4:30 AM when he woke up to find me still working on some game project when I was in University. Neither of them play video games so that as a hobby hasn’t been something that we ever shared. I think they might have played Balatro but they are mostly just really excited for me and this crazy thing that happened.
Q: I love Balatro’s artwork. How did you start making art and how has your style evolve throughout time?
Art has always been a big part of my life, but Balatro is the first time I dabbled in creating pixel art. Thankfully I feel like I was able to learn pretty heavily on my past art experience so I was able to find my style relatively quickly.
I can’t remember when I started making art - it is the one hobby I have had since before I can remember. I love the feeling of making art on a physical medium. There is something relaxing about it, and like any other hobby you need to enjoy the process to sustain that joy.
Q: As a means of ending the interview, please share with me a quote from someone that you enjoy.
Tame Impala: “The only one who’s really judging you is yourself, nobody else”
