The Balatro Timeline
localthunk.com
localthunk.com
Balatro is an absolute indie darling and one of the greatest games of this decade. I still think it not getting the GOTY was a miss, this should be a wake-up moment for the industry. Gameplay talks. Not micro transactions, not ultra realistic graphic, gameplay. If your game is fun, people will play it.
Hope many more games like this will come out in the upcoming years, if the industry learned anything.
I think GOTY is probably a tough call against Astro Bot, but there are a lot of categories it could do well in, and even the volume of nominations it's received I think is really impressive and a great achievement for a solo effort.
Balatro was built on the Love2D framework and its success inspired me to start playing with it. I’m a novice programmer but I feel that it’s a really amazing kit and has a lovely community attached to it.
Balatro's probably the most accessible roguelike deckbuilder I have ever played, and it really is a ton of fun. In a lot of ways it feels like 'outsider art' to the genre - the blog post mentioned that the developer didn't really play any similar games during development and it really shows. Balatro really is a breath of fresh air, and brings a lot of innovation to the table.
I've loved the game for some time now, fascinating to see how it was made