The anonymous developer of knockout indie hit Balatro hasn’t shared much publicly since the game was released in February 2024. He did not attend The Game Awards in December 2024, where he was nominated for Game of the Year and won Best Indie, choosing to send a representative to accept the award on his behalf. He hasn’t given any full-length interviews to press, and of course, keeps his identity private. That’s why his lengthy developer diary, published on LocalThunk.com on March 6, came as a surprise to fans.
LocalThunk’s post is filled with fascinating nuggets of information about the game’s development — his pseudonym was inspired by “thunk,” his partner’s nickname for variables in code — but it also offers a tender look into the individual developer’s experience creating a game under intense pressure from beta players and his publishing schedule. In a period of just over two years, LocalThunk wrote, he took a file called CardGame and turned it into the polished version that debuted to explosive success.
“I have a pretty emotional moment where I feel like I did the thing I set out to do,” he wrote, reflecting on playing the game a week before launch. “Finally. I made the fun game I wanted to make.”
That moment was well-earned. He describes the launch and reception as surreal and life changing. He also describes the last six months of development as an intense mental and physical health drain that landed him in the doctor’s office.
“This is when my sleep and heart started having issues,” he wrote of August 2023. “This was entirely because of the stress around dealing with the public, players, and the pressure to get everything done before February 2024.”
The game continued amassing more wishlists, surely increasing the pressure to deliver a great game, and on time, at that. “Every few nights I need to sleep sitting upright on the couch because sleeping while lying down kept getting interrupted by my heart,” he wrote of October 2023. “I felt totally overwhelmed.”
LocalThunk’s health issues came to a head in January 2024, a month before launch. He went to the doctor after a severe anxiety attack he mistook as a heart attack. “I am not normally an anxious person and have never had issues with this in the past,” he wrote, repeatedly mentioning that he still struggles to describe how he felt. “[The doctor] asks me if my work has been stressful lately. I don’t even know how to explain.”
Thankfully for his health, it wasn’t long after this experience that LocalThunk started having opportunities to “watch the fruits of [his] labour for once,” like watching a pre-launch Balatro tournament livestream while eating sushi with his partner. “Hafu wins, because of course she does. She’s Hafu!” he wrote of the Jan. 19, 2024 tournament.
Then, reviews started coming in from media outlets. “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,” he wrote. His stress and anxiety had one last boss battle, though: launch day, and whatever bugs it may bring.
“To my shock – nothing goes wrong,” he wrote. He had planned for at least a month of patching, but instead, LocalThunk watched as tens of thousands of people shared resoundingly positive reviews of the game that started as a three-week project to work on during some paid time off from work. He described early on, realizing that he’d had enough wishlists on Steam to potentially cover his living expenses for a year. Then, on launch day, he checked the Steam sales page a few hours after launch and found that revenue was already at “$600,000, far more money than I’ve made in my entire life.”
The rest, as they say, is gaming history. LocalThunk ended “the most surreal day of [his] life” like so many of us would: with a big hug from a proud, supportive partner, a few burgers, and a bottle of champagne.
