Balatro Creator LocalThunk Talks Inspirations and Jokers | Game Maker's Notebook Podcast

Hey everyone, I'm Trent Kusters, co-founder and studio director of League of Geeks, and this is the Game Makers Notebook. Today, I've had the distinct privilege of speaking with Batro, creator of Local Thunk. We dive into the podcast like we usually do, talking about his first memory in games, but we immediately get on to how we used to make little games and sims that really only his friends ever played. We talk about lessons he learned from those projects, whether it be scoping, the challenges of UI implementation, or when one of them is done and it's time to move on to the next one. Then we get into Batro, and we talk about how it was inspired by the classic card game Big 2 and how he would play that with his friends. We talk about the power of the concept of a card, like this idea of a playing card, which is almost a universally cultural concept. We talk about how he implemented systems as he went in his design process, how he balanced their interaction, and this idea of ruthless design, as he called it, where removing entire systems would often make the game more fun and more enjoyable. We talk about community feedback and the critical role that it played throughout his development. We talk about his success at launch, critically, culturally, commercially, and how he actually took a step back from the public sphere shortly after launch and put boundaries in place to protect his physical and mental health. We talk about his relationship with Playstack, how he selected that publisher, and the various challenges that they went through and worked through together in releasing the game, one of which was the European ratings board PEGI conflating Batro with gambling imagery. I won't spoil it, but he also has come up with a pretty novel way to ensure that Batro won't ever be used in a gambling setting ever, so do keep your ears pricked for that bit. And then we wrap up talking about his favorite jokers, whether aesthetic or because of their gameplay effects, how his personal experiences in his day-to-day life influenced the jokers' creation. This is Local Th's first commercially released video game, and the fact that he can articulate his design and development process and his creative discipline at a level of some of these other giants that we speak to is absolutely commendable. So whether you're a Batro addict or you're just absolutely enthusiastic about game development and that's why you listen to the Game Makers Notebook, this episode's going to be a treat. And so, without further ado, here's Local Thk. Enjoy.

first memory and games but we immediately get on to how we used to make little games and Sims that really only his friends ever played we talk about lessons he learned from those projects whether it be scoping the

Let's say hello to Jima. He's just a joker in any other game. He has left out the deck and has no value, but in Batro, Jima and other jokers upgrade your poker hands, allowing you to create powerful card synergies. Every run requires a new strategy. Harness these jokers to their full potential and optimize your deck to defeat tricky enemy boss blinds. Wield the mystic power of terror cards to enhance your individual playing cards and upgrade the poker hands you play with. Planet pack and vouchers, you will need all the help you can get to survive each round. Do you like shiny cards? Batro has multiplier cards, lucky cards, glass cards, bonus cards, steel cards, and stone cards. Keep an eye out for cards with a golden seal. Collect stronger additions for each joker like foil, holographic, polychrome, and the elusive negative power. Batro, never underestimate a joker.

and how he would play that with his friends we talk about how the power of the concept of a card like this idea of a playing card um is almost a universally cultural concept we talk about how he implemented systems as he

Okay, Local Thk, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

I like 50% of the world's population have been playing Batro for, I don't know, how many weeks now? Or should I say it's been playing me? Whenever my Steam Deck is in line of sight, I'm drawn to it. Whenever it's in a room nearby, I can feel it burning, like the Ring of Mordor calling me.

Congratulations on your success. The virality of this thing's just been amazing.

Yeah, thank you. I feel like it hasn't quite sunk in yet, like all these months later, so it's still kind of surreal.

Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Now, I noticed you did a couple of interviews and things like that post-release, but then you kind of went dark for a little while and took a break, or at least a break from the comms. Were you focusing on the mobile build? Did you sort of step away for a bit in the madness of things to soak it all in?

It was mostly mobile stuff. It got really busy in the middle there, in the middle of the summer. There, I wear a lot of hats, as you can imagine. I do most of the work. I have someone helping me with porting things, but it was good for me to just focus on, I think, the task at hand.

So yeah, totally makes sense. David Lynch has this fantastic interview clip where he's like, every time I make a movie, people are asking me about the movie, and they're like, what do you have to say about the movie? And he's like, the movie is what I have to say about it. That's me talking about the movie.

Yeah, yeah, I feel that.

Yeah, well, hey, thanks for joining us. Really, really glad to have you on, but I do want to take it back to how you first got into games and sort of chart your course all the way to Batro, because, you know, I mean, Batro is one of those games that could seem like an overnight success, but I know that there are a few things that sort of helped along the way and that there were stepping stones before Batro. So let's take it all the way back, and let's start with your first memory of video games or the first time that video games kind of changed your brain as a youngster. Do you have any recollections?

Yeah, I did like video games a lot as a child. I was definitely scolded a few times for being on the computer instead of reading when I was young. So, I think the first time I can really remember playing a game was when I was a kid playing Midtown Madness on our family PC. If you haven't heard of Midtown Madness, it's like a weird racing game, kind of like GTA, but you can't get out of the car, so it's not as, you know, gratuitously violent or anything.

Well, yeah, it's a Rockstar game as well. A lot of people play it and don't realize too. That's why it's kind of got those GTA vibes. I'm learning this live right now, you guys see.

Yeah, I mean, I didn't know as a six-year-old playing that game what it was. You're like, I believe this is the developer Rockstar game. Very discerning.

Yeah, yeah. That was definitely my first big memory of me playing a game and wanting, like, being excited about going back to it. And it was, I played it as kind of like a sandboxy experience, just like playing in this world. I didn't really race very much in it. I wasn't trying to beat a campaign or anything. So yeah, that's probably my first memory.

Hell yeah. And do you remember sort of as a youngster when it kind of switched from playing video games into a hobby? How early did you get into game development?

Oh, that was much, much, much later.

Interesting.

Yeah, so, you know, when I was a kid, I played a lot of video games, but the video games that I played were pretty basic. I think they were like, I definitely am not as hardcore as a lot of other devs from stories that I hear, but I was playing, you know, Halo and Call of Duty and, you know, like Guitar Hero. I was a huge fan of that game. But I wasn't making games at that time, nor did I know anything about coding or making art assets for in-game or anything like that. I was pretty creative as a child. I liked to do art a lot, like physical art. And so that's probably the closest facility-type hobby that I had, but I didn't really start getting into proper game development until I was in university.

Oh, cool, cool. Did you kind of wander into that, or what were you studying at university?

Well, to start with, I was studying industrial engineering or mechanical engineering, the program I was in, which is not computer-related really at all. And partway through my degree, I took this computer science course, and I think we h...

time that video games kind of changed your brain as a youngster do you have any Recollections yeah I did like video games a lot as a child I was um definitely scolded a few few times for uh being on the computer instead of

reading when I was young so um the I think the first time time I can really remember playing a game was uh when I was a kid playing Midtown Madness on her like family PC if you haven't heard of

Midtown madis it's like uh it's like a weird racing game kind of like GTA but you can't like get out of the car so it's not as you know gratuitously violent or anything well yeah it's a rockstar game as well a lot of people

they play it they don't realize too that's why it's kind of got those GTA Vibes I I'm learning this live right now you guys see yeah I mean I was I didn't know as like a you know a six-year-old

playing that game what it was you're like I believe this is the developer Rockstar game very Discerning yeah yeah um that was definitely my first like big memory of me playing a game and wanting like being excited about going back to

it and it was I played it as kind of like a sandboxy experience just like playing in this world I didn't really race very much in it I wasn't trying to like beat a campaign or anything so yeah

that's that's probably my first memory hell yeah and do you remember sort of as a youngster when it kind of switched from playing video games into a hobby how early did you get into game development oh that was much much much

later um interesting yeah so I you know when I was a kid I played a lot of video games but the video games that I played were pretty basic I think I think they were like I definitely am not as like

hardcore as a lot of other devs from stories that I hear but like I was playing you know Halo and Call of Duty and you know like the Guitar Hero I was a huge fan of that game um but I wasn't

making games at that time nor did I know anything about coding or uh making like art assets for in game or anything like that I was pretty creative as a child I like to do art a lot um like physical

art um and so that's probably like the closest fact simility type hobby that I had but I didn't really start getting into proper game development until I was in university oh cool cool did you kind of wander into that or do what were you

studying at University well to start with I was studying uh indust or it's like industrial engineering or mechanical engineering the program I was in which is not computer related really at all um and partway through my degree I took

this computer science course and I think we had to make some kind of a game in it I can't remember exactly maybe it was a simulation of something and I got like totally hooked on it um something about it was just I

don't know it clicked with me and I started doing it in my spare time all the time outside of University so I'd frequently you know be up until like 4 in the morning working on either some kind of a little game or some kind of a

little simulation usually um and then in my final year uh of school I dropped out of engineering because I was like yeah this just isn't for me I'm way more passionate about computer science and I I enrolled in computer science and got a

degree in that instead okay wow yeah so you really kind of like pivoted there yeah yeah and and these like little side projects I was working on were kind of the Catalyst for that too so and I enjoyed like the final couple

years of my school way more than my first few because of that I was I was following something I actually cared about so God that's yeah it's amaz isn't it amazing how I can just stumble into something that we like genuinely like

adore and love and you're like oh maybe this should be the thing that I'm like paying all this money to study and might do for the rest of my life in some way yeah and especially um like people kind

of talk to me about they're like oh don't you ever think about going back and finishing your engineering degree because it would take me like a year to get an engineering degree at this point but I keep thinking like why you know I

pick the thing I want to do it's not I don't look at it like waste of time it's just I know what I want to do now so um so yeah it's it's funny the story of how you get to where you are yeah totally

totally do you remember the sort of the moment that sort of inspired you getting stuck into these little kind of like Sims or like what kind of was the sort of the light bulb moment or the the little thread that you pulled on that

sort of got you tinkering away at something I don't know I feel like I was treating it almost like the first few programs I made one of them was a game it was like um I can't remember what the

gamees called it's it's a really common word game that beginning programmers make and it's where you have like a four-letter word you have to change it to another four-letter word but you can only flip one letter at a time okay cool

um I remember I made one those but most of the projects I was working on were like simulations of like cellular automa or like a temperature map simulation and it almost felt like I was I had an ant

hill or like a an ant farm and I was controlling the parameters and I could see immediately I could see the results of like little numbers that I was tweaking um I think that part was really addictive for me and I kind of held on

to that for most other projects I've worked on since then I'd say batro might be actually the exception to that um where there's no AI there's nothing there's no simulation uh of NPCs per se um so it's it's quite different in that sense for

me because usually it's yeah it was kind of a way to create some kind of a world and watch it go yeah well you know God you've done that in some way shape or form right it's amazing the um these

strategy and like you know these these deck builders and stuff they are a simulation in some way shape or form right like the there's the the constraining of both ends or the you know the different things that you

inject into it and everything that will create different outcomes it's it's not surprising that's kind of LED you down this path yeah yeah there there are some I think similarities for sure um uh as much as I I think that some of the other

project projects I've worked on are more simulation I have heard that a lot how it's kind of like a rot Goldberg experience and you do kind of watch it go so like who were you just making these games for yourselves or did you have

like uh was it were you sharing it with your classmates at University or it was mostly for me um I I did share it with friends I like to you know I'd make a build of a game and I'd send the files

on like Google drive over to a friend and be like hey I made this I thought you might find it interesting um but for the most part it really was for me because I liked making them and actually

I think that's one of the surprising things to me is that I don't hear a lot of other devs tell me that story um for people that I've talked to uh usually they knew they wanted to make a game and

they wanted to release a game and they wanted to you know contribute to this Rich industry that we're in and I felt kind of like I didn't even know a lot of it existed I think if I knew about it at

the time I probably would have been more interested in publishing some of these games to like itch IO or steam or something but yeah I don't know I feel like I was kind of in my own little world for a long time it yeah that's

kind of amazing and of itself I was the same for many years it wasn't until I was like even though I played video games like the only thing I did as a kid was like skateboard did ta condo and

played video games that's it like and I um I just didn't realize at any point in time that you could really that there was it was possible to make them as a job it sounds funny to say out loud but

like I had some moment and then when I did realize I was like oh that's not for me that's for like super smart maths Geniuses or something because I knew there was coding involved and I never ID a super smart maths genius I think I

think that's honestly where I was coming from too is I knew that it existed I knew it was a job you could get but I had heard all these stories about like how hyper competitive the industry is which it is and I thought like oh so

there's no point like there's no way that I could break into that so I may as well just do this for me and not even bother like not even not even worry about it yeah um so I I I completely

understand where you're coming from from that I think that's that's really what I was thinking the whole time too so yeah well hey do you have any like tell us about some of the give us like a sort of

a shout out of a couple of or a few of these like little simulations or games that you think kind of really helped you know because as developers or as creat you'll know this as an artist right you

the things that we make they help develop our our style and our creative voice and our artistic voice were there some games that you can think of that really sort of were watershed moments in regards to developing your own voice

because you've clearly come to arrived with batro um with a very distinctive creative voice as a developer yeah I do think there were some really important moments for me I think a lot of moments of failure which is really important too

but um the biggest for me was a game uh I can't even remember the name it might not have had a name it's probably called map game if I'm being honest map game or math game map map game map game I'm a

big geo geography nerd or at least I was in university and um I was watching uh videos of Europa universalis then I got into that game and I wanted to make like a that game like is notoriously very there's a lot of

systems it's complicated it's and I have a very short attention span so I felt like oh I want to make like a simple version of that game where you have uh you know countries and you simulate their borders and they go to

war and they have allies and um they can have rebellions and create you know historically accurate countries of that region and um and I spent I spent so long on this game I actually spent probably longer than I did on batro on

this game oh wow probably three years years I worked on it um and it was so much fun to make it was it was amazing I love that game I don't know if it's any fun um but I mean to me the the hobby is

making games it's not having had a game be made by me it's it's like the process of making games is so fun and that was three years of me having like an amazing time in my uh as a hobby so um that was

really important for me because it kind of what what I think it taught me is that I need to go like Crank It Up to 11 get obsessed spend too much time working on a part of a game or a part of a project

that you don't think anyone's really going to pay attention to because not because that makes the game better but because that's ultimately what's the most rewarding for me um and I think I've held on to that in badro I think

there's a lot of things I did that with in batro as well so yeah yeah that's the biggest one for sure um just to shout out another one um there's a game I used to play as a kid called kocol it's I

believe it's a Canadian board game um where it's it's kind of like shuffle board but smaller you like flick a disc from the edge of a circle into like the middle of the circle and it it scores kind of like curling it's hard to

describe if you haven't played it before but it's a very like physical tactile physics based real life game and I made a version of that um it was the first time I dabbled in like physics simulations per se and um I also was the

first time I developed like an AI that could beat your ass if it's on like the highest difficulty and that was a lot of fun too I had a lot of fun making that so yeah those are two that I wanted

to shout out in particular yeah hell yeah all right well you mentioned you know something that we love on the podcast as well are failures right and the lessons that we learned from them what was you know you worked on that

game map game for three years I'm sure that was pockmarked with failures along the way right large and small are there any in particular that that come to mind big lesson uh yes I think uh this is kind of a technical answer maybe but I

think it's important for for game devs and that's um I crashed and burned on implementing a UI um I think any Game Dev can can resonate with this that UI UI is the hardest part of making a game holy crap and I wasn't using a

library for anything I was trying to like implement it all myself and so I I wasn't I wasn't using much for the rest of the game and it's easy enough to make like a square on the screen into a

different color but then making it into a button that reacts the way you want it to every single time and it displays information correctly and that's it's hard it's like really hard so I never got it to work I spent three years on

that game and I just like I gave up on the UI basically so you kind of have to just know what's going on with it um that was one failure so I feel like I when I started batro I approached it

from a a UI first perspective like learn get this down 100% And then you can um then it's easy to to you know design the game from there but and when you say get this down 100% do you mean like the the

technical infrastructure for setting up your UI or do you mean wireframes and sort of having it it sort of wif framed out no not wireframe because I feel like those are the kinds of things I change all the time but getting the foundation

of the in like yeah the game infrastructure now so I can modifi it and I can add buttons easily and remove them easily and whatnot um but also like I like making my own mistakes and not using like a library for some of these

things because I know how everything works now and I know I'm the only one to blame so I know I'm the one that has to fix it too um so yeah that was that was one of the failures I had in that game

um I think another one is um I the scoping I think every devil also has issues with scoping as well but um I was trying to add like historical historically accurate countries that could pop up in every region of the

world and I got through North America and I was like oh my God there is no shot I can do this for the rest of the planet um like it's going to take years for me to do this what was I thinking U

but I already started so I just kind of gave up on that part of it too because it's like you know I'm not going to work on this for the next however long but um something that I learned from my

background in art is that if you're working on something and well for me at least as a hobbyist if you're working on something and it's not like bringing you Joy anymore and you're not you're not having fun anymore you have to let

yourself give up Let Yourself fail move on to the next thing because the next thing's going to be better yeah interesting so do you do you have a is there kind of a through line in your experiences with making these games that

you because I'm taking from what you've said that none of these kind of had commercial aspirations right until batro like you were just yeah yeah you were just kind of as you say in it for the journey not the destination so I

remember talking to tan and Zach Adams from bay12 games the creators of dwar Fortress and they're they were similar in many ways and they would you know just make these games and I was like how would you know when to step off them and

they they were like we when we'd ran them into the ground when we' basically reached a complete design or technical dead end and there was nothing left and we had to abandon it basically um there was no more blood from that stone do you

have a is there a similar through line in when you found it's time to drop a concept whether that be at three months or three years uh yeah actually I really like that answer um that they gave uh

well for me like I mentioned before um the reason why I make games is because it's fun the process of making games is really enjoyable for me I like making games more than I like playing games uh so for me I think it's kind of simple

like I stop working on a game when it's not fun to work on anymore when I have another idea that's better or when the vision is just like yeah this is about as far as I want it to go it's good

enough um and I try not to make myself feel guilty about that because I think if you make yourself feel guilty about it then it it adds a little barrier to starting the next thing yeah um so because I never had commercial

aspirations for these things I I never had like a deadline or a timeline or a road map for what 100% looks like so uh I think it was easy for me to stick to that ethos yeah yeah it's and I mean if

you're in it for the journey not the destination what a fantastic metric to decide when to step onto the next thing that's great and I guess you know also it sounds like yourself you're part of the journey for you with in the

discovery and the learning and so if you're not enjoying it I imagine that the growth or the learning that one experimental project can provide is kind of exhausted right yeah yeah like I think I would get pretty bored if I was

working on the same exact thing over and over and over again for like a decade um that might not be true um but I I do think I need to have kind of a change of pace and like a new exciting idea to

keep things fresh uh so yeah definely and are you are you rolling your own engines for these games or are you like are you working out of unity or I actually I I don't even know it's one of

the things I didn't check in my research here for um well it's it's a complicated answer because I think like the spectrum of made it in an engine and made like made my own engine it's like it's not

binary I think it's kind of like a sliding scale I think I'm somewhere in the middle I use a framework Called Love 2D right wow heard that on I'm familiar with it but no one has ever mentioned that on this podcast oh yeah it's not

it's not there's not like a ton of games that are made with it commercially but it's really popular with h Game Dev jams uh because it's pretty easy to get like a a prototype off the ground with it um

I moved to that from like C++ because it was quicker for me to do the same kinds of things that I and and a similar level level of control to what I used to have you're scripting in Lua with that right

yes exactly I'm scripting in Lua and uh which is a language I've totally fallen in love with too all right um it's I don't know there's something special but it's it's so idiosyncratic and weird in a lot of ways but it's I don't know I

love it yeah I remember when I first got started in video games that was like the scripting language that our own proprietary one at the studio that I was working at was based off it was it was yeah was a lot of fun scripting stuff

yeah I think most people's experience with it is as a modding uh like they use that for modding in like robloxs and in World of Warcraft and even like um Photoshop I think is all the scripts are written in leis so that's usually

people's experience with it is like as a tacked on modding framework to some other game uh The Chosen language of 13y olds and graphic designers around the world exactly exactly uh but I don't know for me it was I didn't want to

learn Unity or unreal or whatever cuz I didn't want a big clunky IDE like I had background in a lot of this stuff already I wanted like a lowlevel control so I I made like my own physics engine for the game for example just

because I didn't want to I didn't want to use someone else is like I thought it was like a fun challenge to try and make like realistic looking and feeling physics in the game so yeah yeah oh yeah

well yeah congrats it's it's funny because you really struck that balance of um like real because you know uh we we developed ouro which obviously has like cards in play all the time and you know like taking those cards I remember

out our um absolutely superbly talented Tech director Tom like in a day whipped up like a a Shader that gets applied to the cards that just makes them look like they're fully in a 3D space and it was

one of those you know when a programmer goes off and does something it just blows everyone's mind in the studio um and you've managed so I the reason why I say that anecdote is I know the difficulty of like trying to make

something sort of have that physics feel to it but the issues that you can run into with the real physics side of things but having it be because obviously a huge huge quality of your game is The arcadey Punchy feel to it um

so you struck a really great balance there I mean we haven't really got into batro but I think there's a perfect segue into this in particular now that we're just chatting about it was there was there tell me about that sort of

finessing of like the physics and the tactility of the game and um you know maintaining that that arcadey feel to it right yeah so I mentioned earlier something about how I wanted to crank it up to 11 for some things that I didn't

think anyone else would care about this is one of those things and it just so happened that people cared about it um I spent an absurd amount of time just like changing a formula a little tiny bit running the game mousing my cursor over

a card moving it around seeing how it feels going back and forth and doing that like hundreds and hundreds of hours doing that kind of a thing uh just cuz it like it was so fun and satisfying to

do that and I was so motivated to make it as good as possible because it just felt I don't know it was so rewarding the process of doing that was just so rewarding and I think I really locked

into the fact that a lot of those things in batro that I wanted to crank up to 11 like that people resonate with they also enjoy interacting with those things so um that's why I did it at least I I

spent a long time on the physics because it was just uh it was a joy to kind of explore that that problem set myself yeah and it's amazing like I will talk a little bit more about the late

game later on but just like what it adds and brings to the comprehension of the game at you know because obviously it you have turned it up to 11 It Feels So Punchy when these cards are like slamming down or you know shaking or

doing their thing you know and they're all Juiced up in this way that's you know really kind of centered in this really physical tactile feel but even when you ramp the game up to 4X speed and you're like at the end game and you

you know you've got like multiple mols hitting on cards and everything like that and crazy [ __ ] is going on it's um it's amazing that it still holds together were you tweaking like were you looking at both ends of things did you

kind of have a save game late game and sort of like booting that up and seeing how it looked in that and then going back to like sort of 1x play or was it kind of just organically keeping an eye

on things and seeing making sure it didn't sort of fall a pot later on well that one was uh so I would finish working on one thing like for example the juice and the cards and then I would

like turn up the game speed and be like okay how how high can I make this game speed before this thing starts this ship starts falling apart you know like how fast can we make this thing go yeah and

uh I kind of would tweak it from there so every time I introduced a new thing like the the flame effect is another one every time I tacked on a new thing like that I would be like okay how far can I

push this thing before it really starts to like show its cracks and uh and then just get obsessed over that and make sure it looks good from as the zero slides from zero to one make sure it looks good along every step of the way

yeah yeah that's great it's and you know it's amazing I think obviously you've done a lot of work here just in that process even as like a little microcosm of it um in retaining that comprehension across the various speeds and you know

how um you know the multiple lay effects and everything that can happen in the lake game but it is Al I'm always amazed at like what a human is capable of comprehending in like when they're an hour into Flow State you know just like

you've got them locked in for the last 59 minutes they haven't blinked like what a human can like pass in regards to information is severely impressive always blows my mind definely um all right well look we kind of skipped ahead into batro so

let's like let's do it let's go right back to the start of batro um talk to me tell me what the year was was the month the day the place you were when when it kind of hit you the the seed of this

idea okay I I have a story about this actually it's maybe even a little earlier than you're expecting um I'm it let's go when I was in high school um me and two of my close friends uh I'm

Canadian by the way we would go to Tim Horton's which is a Canadian staple coffee shop um we would go to Tim Horton's quite few week nights every week and we would play card games with each other um like I played card games

my whole life uh like with my great-grandmother I played card games with my family growing up with uh my friends um just normal 52 card card games and when I was I was going to Tim's a few times a week with my friends

and we made a game was my first experience with game design was then actually we made this this game it's based on a Cantonese card game called Big two big two wow that is a deep cut yeah it's how how are you exposed to that was

it family or friends or no one of my friends uh showed us how to play it and I had played the game janitor and or president before it goes by a bunch of different names it's it's a card

shedding game um and it's very similar but big two is uh I think that's the one that we played the most big two and we s kind of organically came up with this weird version of the game where instead of playing everything face

up you actually play it face down and you say what you're playing and then there's kind of maybe just for I'm just going to dive in here for for our listeners who aren't familiar with what big two is maybe just give them like an

overview because the Sim the similarities to batro are like evident once you sort of understand oh for sure yeah I guess if you know batro then um basically you have a hand you have a hand of cards um I believe it's you

start with 13 I'm not entirely sure but you have a whole bunch of cards in your hand you're playing against other players that also have cards in their hand you can't see you you play maybe like a three by itself and that counts

as a poker hand just a three it's a high card three and then you go around the circle and then uh other players can play a higher card they can play a four five six what have you you could also

play a pair instead and then they also have to beat it with a pair you could play three of a kind four of a kind a straight Etc it's you're playing poker hands basically so there's there's a lot

of similarities at the base mechanical level to um to batro there um which is actually what batro is based on is Big Two not not on poker so um so that's big two normally you play all those hands

face up so that your the next player knows what to play but in our version of a game you play them face down and then you say what it is oh this is a three this is a three of kind with Jack or

what have you and then there's a bluffing component um and it was so much fun we played it all the time um and I don't know I have a lot of memories of us playing that game and so

during the pandemic um years later um I wanted to make like an online version of that game because there are online versions of big 2 that I could have played with my friends but I wanted to play that

original game that we made made um all those years ago with them so I was initially it was December uh 2021 maybe either 2021 or 2022 that I started working on this game um and it was that was the intention it was just

going to be a our weird version of big two that's that's all it was going to be um and at the time I was watching Northern lion play luck be a landlord and the idea kind of hit me like I kind

of abandoned the original idea of the game right away after I had the engine the engine made Ryan's just Ryan's just like his stream has just completely turned you in a 180 my poor friends I was like oh I got

this fun idea we could play you know that old game we used to play we could play and then like two weeks later like ah yeah never mind guys I'm on this other thing um so I really enjoyed like

be a landlord I enjoyed a lot about it one of the things is how non- gamery it was it wasn't soaked in this fantasy lore language uh that I didn't really identify with because I wasn't playing these games growing up you know I was

playing Midtown Madness and Halo I wasn't playing you know uh Dungeons and Dragons and like Diablo so um so I I love that about it I love that it was just pure numbers uh and then that was kind of the

excitement of it and I love the engine building ideas behind it so that's kind of how it all started is December back in I don't know about three years ago at this point so yeah 2021 yeah wow it's funny you know and

just for our listeners as well our our wonderful producer claudo has mentioned that another variant or it's got numerous variants but another name for a big two is especially for our Filipino friends is py Dos or it might be called

you know big juice or Top Dog depending on where you're from but yeah great game I remember playing it's funny because I you know just come from a f family of whes like you know there wasn't really an Asian influence when I was younger

but we um yeah we played that as kids as well it was a it was a classic yeah that I think there's something about um these shedding card games I think most cultures have some variant of this with

the the standard 52 card deck that's that's popped popped up over the last like hundred years um I feel like when I describe the game to someone without saying what the name is they'll be like oh yeah that's this game I used to play

that when I was a kid so um it's just funny I don't know I think there's something really magic and special about playing cards is like this this shared cultural language of games um and this the conversation always comes up over

and over again when I talk to game developers about it like there's something very inherently magical I think about playing cards so yeah I'm so glad that you said that because they really that's like something that I had

in my notes here and it is something that I wanted to dive into into with you because you know coming from our Melo even where it's not playing cards right we understood that and it was very evident from even when so our melow we

prototyped it on paper for about eight months before we got stuck into anything digital and even just any of the mechanics that we turned into cards um there was some that really worked and some that didn't and there was this

really you know I can't recall the design metric or the sort of the razor that I'd sort of that I'd come to realize back then because it was 10 years ago or more now but there was clearly card or features that worked

because the the construct of a card is this universally understood thing you know in it like that you have like the design affordance in a card like you hand someone this rectangular piece of paper or cardboard and they know what to do

with it they know that they play it that it has some kind of functionality that it can interact with other cards itself there is you know law around them it's so easy to have this law around them being magical or that things can be

contained in them like you know all of these games that even if they use a poked deck we're projecting Concepts that are abstracted a lot of the time into these you know 52 deck you know uh 52 card deck the classic playing card

deck um it's tell me a little bit about what you what you realized during development you were latching on to and you were utilizing and because obviously as you mentioned you play Big Two you wanted to do this thing with your

friends and then you saw um Ryan streaming like be a landord and I'm guessing you didn't say it explicitly but I'm guessing the big pivot for you was away from multiplayer and into a single player kind of Rog like variant

of the game yeah so huge pivot obviously you know really special there but was there something did you know from the start that you were onto something really special and magical with the playing card thing and what did you

learn after the fact and obviously the game went super viral that's it's it's played an it's had an impact obviously on the success of the game I'd love to hear the difference in you know how you perceive the value of just the the 52

card playing deck and you know the construct of cards and the concept of a card in our minds culturally and then how you feel about it now afterwards and seeing the success that you've had and how people have reacted to the game well

first of all I I completely agree with what you were saying earlier about about cards being it's people just know what to do with them um so I think when I started I didn't I didn't really know that um I wasn't I wasn't basing this

game this engine building game off the fact that people have an inherent understanding of what to do with cards and I'm really leaning on that I didn't know that until partway through so I think what I've done is I've really

stood on the shoulders of giants and I've borrowed this tried and true game design strategy which is I think it's kind of skew morphism of people just know what to do with cards they see a card they know what it does they know

how to they know how to interact with it like you said yeah um I borrowed that without really thinking about what the implications were and I think I borrowed a lot more heavily than other games in the past have and I think that's part of

the reason why I succeeded too like I B not only did I borrow like you're supposed to play a card or you could discard a card because other games are like that as well but I also borrowed things like the language behind Rarity

in trading card games you know like oh this is like a foil like I'm opening a booster pack uh I think people kind of have an understanding of how how those things work as well yeah and they're also linked to like memories and high

spikes in Emotion from kid and you get your first like Blastoise foil or something from your Pokémon deck seeing that your first foil Joker in um in in batro like absolutely is like tapping into some kind of PA of you know like

your brain networks was like formed as a kid yeah definitely so there's there's a there's an element of that that I was borrowing from not only like playing card Traditions but also just general card game Traditions I was pulling it

from any direction I could tarot cards right I'm pulling from from that as well so um another part of it is that I I also didn't tack on too much complexity to the core mechanics of the game so

they are when you start it is literally just playing cards that's all it is like you're playing it like you're playing big two yeah um or poker like you're just trying to find the highest scoring hand in your in your bunch and you're

trying to discard to get better hands and and what have you and um and then I think the thing where I started taking creative Liberties and like extending past what people are familiar with is the Jokers um a lot of them are just

kind of wacky like the starting Joker is obviously just like a normal Joker from a deck of cards but like they get wacky the things that they do have nothing to do with normal playing card decks at all

so so I feel like a lot of the design of the game is like a trojan horse where I snuck in a more complex game wearing the Hat of a simple game in a way yeah it's the it's the pill in the paina but

yeah exactly peanut butter yeah exactly yeah it's it's it is amazing and it is like you've laid it out here and to be completely honest with you I hadn't actually thought about it that way obviously I'm playing it and

experiencing it like everyone else but yeah you just play the game like big two and all of the elements around it are then layering the trading card or the like tarot mechanics and everything so your complexity as a player and how you

interact with it doesn't actually change it's just your comprehension of how things are going to play out right yeah yeah and I don't want to say that I completely locked into making it you know this really simple experience to

start with I think the reason why it happened that way is because I I dislike complexity in other games so so I was really hesitant to add you know really long descriptions um really complex interactions between two single elements

of the game I think the complexity is better when it emerges between you know more nodes than just like a couple you know really complicated things I don't think I did a perfect job of that part but um yeah I think because I'm so

averse to complexity in other games I think it was just kind of naturally that that's how this game evolved [ __ ] yeah yeah it's so it's so incredible like how organic it sort of has seemed to have happened so let's

let's go back to this this timeline of your development so you've you've had this moment where you watching um northern lion play like be a landlord you decide on this pivot what are the kind of was it just like oh my God this

is it and you were like a coiled up Spring and sort of you know you had a big burst of momentum or like tell me about those first few kind of prototypes or so or actually I'm guessing that's

how you work um yeah I I was kind of just stumbling forward a little bit like for the first I didn't have I don't have like a game design document or anything I just like um I didn't have jokers in the game for

like a few months um which sounds yeah I know right I love those weird tidbits of game trivia it's like yeah we we didn't even have like Ally in the game last of us or something like that like you didn't have the central

mechanic in your game p have along it's so beautiful yeah well it and it wasn't very fun like at the start it was just kind of like you play the hand and then that's kind of it like the only way you

interact with the game is you up Creed the playing cards and that was it and it was too complicated because then you instead of keeping track of five Jokers you're as the main thing you're keeping track of 52 cards is the main thing and

I wanted that to like not be the main thing that you're talk you're thinking about when you're playing so um that it it evolved very slowly I wouldn't even say it was fun at all for like eight months in in development yeah um but

actually personally I don't think I had fun with the game until like the week it was released if I'm being honest but um just like all my previous that's that's not that's not an uncommon thing right and like it's very so I work in strategy

games obviously right we have a studio for the last 13 years we've been making strategy games and it's insane how long you can be making your own our last game that we released around the same time as balro just a few days afterwards Sol and

firm that game is a reimagining of a game that was released in 2009 like we just basically like obviously I don't want to minimize it but you know like we took this game from 2009 and brought it into the you know the um into 2024 and

made it 3D and everything we you know tweaked some things but it was a game that we knew was there and worked we knew what we were make not only did we have a blueprint we had a whole existing

game and still the game [ __ ] sucked for ages I remember talking to Shams formerly of paradox now Arrowhead and him talking about how how bad Crusader Kings 3 was for like so long in development it was like the third

iteration of a game that they've been developing for years it's these systems heavy games right like you I've I've actually read an interview where you talk about you know the key of or you know the core of batro really is like

things interacting with each other right and creating these really interesting decision spaces of what card do I play to get these things and having effects and cards and content layering over the top of each other you need a certain

amount of systems and then a certain amount of content in the game for that to even work cry definitely oh yeah and not only that but like when you add a system it when in my case at least I'm

batting 500 like I very often add a system and flesh it out over the course of a month two months three months maybe a year and then it's like oh this actually just sucks this is not fun you

have to be okay just like getting rid of it because with a systems heavy game like this if an entire system you're interacting with isn't fun then all the systems that inter it interacts with is are also going to suffer for it so you

have to be really ruthless I think with your design and being okay just yeah I just wasted a whole bunch of time but it's not a waste because now I know that this doesn't work you know yeah what a

fantastic piece of advice how one system can just Poison the Well so to speak yeah you can't get attached to it because it I have an example of one like I had a I was struggling with um the

money in the game and people were able to re roll too much so you can basically just force whatever build you want every single game which is counter to my kind of design idea that I had and so I was

like oh I'll just introduce a new mechanic a new currency for rerolls just for rerolls implemented it added some items around it and it just sucked it just plain sucked I spent a lot of time on it and I remember deleting it the one

day and then playing it again and I was like oh this is just way better I don't know why like it's it's so obvious that that was the right thing to do but now I know you know so I can I can move past

it and I can try and find a different solution to the problem wow yeah yeah Inc incredible stuff the things we discover when we were going and just like you know I really learned that lesson early on in my career too I

remember I was working on a game for Warner Brothers like a license game and the producer came out from Warner Brothers and like asked me to change something and I was just so against it um and he was he basically just put his

foot down he was like change it dude and I was like okay changed it and the game was immediately better yeah and it really taught me something real like there that I took forward with me moving moving on which is exactly what you're

saying it was the same moment for me in games now I did interrupt you there you were talking about um like you know implementing The Joker and how you sort of came to figure out you that the game

wasn't fun yeah right so um so what I did in that case is what I always did when I was making games and I um you know I was working on the game for probably a few months at that point and

I I was having no fun in actually playing the game I was having a ton of fun making it but I didn't think the game was any fun itself and I gave it to my friends to play um I think I gave it

to three or four friends and I think some of them probably didn't play it because they're like oh what is this like uh he here he is giving us another game again um but one of them like a

month or two later one of them I was talking to them they're like oh yeah that g game that card game that you had I played it for like 40 hours and I'd never heard someone say that before

about one of my games and I was like what like yeah so I knew that there was something there at that point I and I wasn't maybe able to experience it because I the discovery process was already gone for me and that's kind of a

big part of Rogue likes um but so I knew there was something there at that point I didn't just didn't have a chance to experience it until much much later later so H yeah hell yeah okay so you what were

the kind of watershed moments of the game really coming together for you that was one like you sort of charting charting the development in regards to like big discoveries or big because another thing that is you know is quite

incredible about um batro development is that you're actually not a Rog Rog likee or deck builder player right like you explicitly went out of your way not to play those games so that they wouldn't to use the analogy again right Poison

the Well right in the way that you're approaching these things and you I I've read something where you've spoken about you know the um the node maps for you know um deck building progression and stuff like that of Pathways you can take

and how you might have just Co-op to that had you seen it previously which would have been obviously the wrong decision for batro like talk to me a little bit about you know that um that thinking and then maybe some watershed

moments through development that you think you came to organically um and I've got a couple here that we can dive into as well sure yeah um well to start with like I have played Rog likee games before um and I I really enjoy them

maybe not as much to play but more to think about I just there's something about the discovery process and the the whole idea of synergies just going completely off the- wall in a game like The Binding of Isaac that I really do

love um so when I started working on batro and I knew it was going to be a Rogue like which was probably within the first month um I decided then like avoid Rogue likes don't play any deck builders

that to that point I hadn't played one before like I I saw Northern lion play Lu beia landlord so you know I knew how that game worked but I I was like stop watching it you're gonna you know you're

going to learn too much um and instead um do it yourself and the reason why I did that wasn't because because I wanted to make some crazy commercial success I didn't want to make something that was unique I wanted to make

something that I didn't know I wanted to dive into unknown design space myself because it's way way more fun to do that than it is to do like a technical demo where you're just reimplementing something that you see I don't I don't

find that nearly as fun is just like going head first into a problem yourself and trying to figure out which way is up so that you can swim to the surface um I I find that way more rewarding

personally so that's that's why I did it that way now I think one of the things that I I have seen people say is like oh I didn't play any Rog lights before that's not true I I've played Rog leges

before and I even played a a few Rog leges during development um I was trying to avoid deck builder specifically so I was playing um I think the one I played the most was um risk of rain too I

really love that game a lot um but that was really the only one I played for about two years of development uh for this game so I was trying to avoid in general the that whole kind of area yeah and you think it

obviously had like a positive impact is there anything okay here's a question have you played in many deck builders in the time since launch I've obviously you've been a very busy person but um yeah so I played I played slay

the Spire um and I like that game a lot um I've played a few since then as well um yeah so I do play them now I I don't play them a lot I I just don't really play video games that much in general to

be honest but um I do pay attention to them a lot more because I feel like I'm an industry participant now and I there's a lot of things I really appreciate about some of the nuan design ideas that people come up with now and

it always makes me so thankful that like oh thank thank God I wasn't paying attention to this stuff when I was working on batro because it would have it would have ruined it I think I just would have stolen all these ideas you

know um yeah so sorry second part of your question there was about uh did I stumble into anything good because of that and I I think most of the good things I that I implemented were stumbled into because of that so wow

like the skip mechanic in the game for example um I think it's maybe a little controversial I really love it though it's basically my version of the navigation system like the node map um the the scoring system is just

multiplication but I feel like I don't see it very often now that I I look at other games um and the Tableau of jokers where you can remove them if you want but you only have a limited set of them uh it

felt really natural to me maybe because I had like the background of big 2 and you have like a maximum hand size in big two but looking at other games I I don't see that very much either so I do think

there are some small they they seem relatively small to me design ideas that actually have very large gameplay impacts and very large design implications um that push me in different directions throughout the years working on valro yeah well I did you actually

touched on one that I absolutely want to dive into because the blind skip mechanic is it's so different to the risk reward proposition that a lot of deck builders propose and especially like even a lot of Rogue likes propose

that I think I was playing batro for six to 10 hours before I realized before I bothered to like actually see what the value proposition was that it said on it and I was like oh wait this is good for

me if I do this this is very interesting right and then it changed up the entire way that I played beltro and I think this is something that happens as you play btro and like you know the the

various systems and mechanics sort of unfold in front of you and the possibilities unfold in front of you you have these like big light bulb moments but a lot of that is kind of like almost knowledge gated in a sense or like it's

you're a comprehension you reach a point that's then like opens up the next layer of thinking for you whereas this one was like a mechanic very explicitly that I took for granted or kind of ignored or just projected my own expectations based

on my frame of reference from design conventions across the genres that it was going to be a completely different proposition to what it was um tell me how you let's talk a little bit about that that skip blind mechanic and how

you arrived at it and you know when it started feeling good if there were any sort of um sort of wins or fails there and getting it to where it is now i' see that the skip blind mechanic is probably

the one thing that's weakest about the game and that was has been the biggest struggle to get right the game but I there's something I just I love about it anyway even though I still think it's not the strongest mechanically um so it

was probably a year and a half into development when I first introduced it um before you always had to do small blind big blind boss and the first iteration of the skip mechanic was if you skip both small and big blind

then the next shop contains a playing card that has like a seal on it I think is what it was horrible reward um the the players were all like why would I ever do this the the you know the value

proposition is terrible on this I'm like yeah you're right um so then I introduced yeah it was about a year and a half in development maybe two years I started introducing different types of SK tags that you can get this new

basically layer of complexity where you have different types of rewards so the value proposition changes throughout the run and it changes depending on the context of you know what Jokers do you have what's your deck composition like um are you struggling to score points

like that kind of thing so um I think it's it's it's in an interesting spot right now I do think that on average you should not skip the tech the uh the blinds I think it's better to play each

blind and then get the value out of playing the round yeah it definitely feels like whenever I do it there's a sync occurring for you know in some way that I'm gonna C that's gonna you know catch up with me at some point yeah yes

it's I think there is there's a balance there I do have kind of a a target of like oh I want you know maybe 25 15 to 25% of the time you could skip um that's kind of the ballpark I was aiming for in

design I think it's probably less than that ideally quite a bit less than that but um it's I still find it really interesting because I I do feel like it was it's a little bit like it's my baby

I I feel like I I came up with it as kind of a novel solution to a a problem that in some ways represents um a navigation system in the game in in kind of a crude a crude context but yeah yeah

yeah it's it's really cool and I actually like I just like I said it really changed the game for me when I started interacting with it in that way it's it's it's one of those it's weird it's one of those things it's um I think

when I see players play the game it's almost hidden in plain sight which there's a lot of mechanics in this game that are like that where you can just kind of ignore what you're seeing on the screen and you can still try and you

know win the game and you might be able to win a run that way but um you don't have to interact with the skip tags if you don't want to uh so like there's a lot of people that like oh yeah I never

read what those are like I never even consider them or there's a lot of people that that's like all they do they just try and Skip every single time so yeah yeah yeah I definitely I would say I'm

not in the 15 to 20% Camp that's for sure um but which probably has something to say about how far I've made it through batro as well um all right look I I think something else that is really

interesting about this because correct me if I'm wrong the progress that you're talking about making on this skip line mechanic happened after your game first interfaced with the public which I believe was putting up a public demo on

your steam page am I right that's the first time the game went public that's uh yeah that's right it was a public it was a beta test them beta test feature yeah they were like play testing or whatever yeah yeah Okay cool so talk to

me a bit obviously like deck builders and you know Rog likes you know the the community interaction and engagement with that is massive and you'd be playing with a few friends already obviously they were playing the game as

you mentioned and it been yourself um who'd been interacting with this but it was the first time that it had gone out into the world and I mean I know that some streamers in that grabbed it and got a bit of traction even in the in the

demo um phase life talk to me a little bit about how that community and the public engaging with your game and the commentary coming around it how did that sh change the shape of your development like all of a sudden it being out in the

open and you now having these stakeholders so to speak of like public how did you pass that information how were you collecting it how did you decide what was for the game and what wasn't yeah it was a really interesting

time um I struggled to remember a lot of it because this is around the time when everything started happening and like publicly I think a lot of people saw and interacted with with me in like my Discord which is where I started talking

to people more more but like in my private life there was a like a lot going I was you know trying to make a company at the time and I was uh talking to playstack about a publishing deal and like there was a lot

going on so I struggled to remember all the details but basically in May of 2023 I posted a yeah steam play test feature which you get basically the full version of the game and uh you go into a queue and I

allow you know however many people to get the full game and then they join the Discord and they say hey this car is stupid hey this all sucks and I'm like yep yep yep and then I write it down

into a big spreadsheet um and so that was the first time I got like real data about the game and basically immediately the game was completely broken it was an unbalanced mess because of course it is you know

I'm not a highly analytical guy like I I'm not the person that would solve this game there's smart people in the internet that are they love doing that kind of thing so but even then it wasn't it wasn't popular for uh at least it

didn't start getting popular at all for at least a month and a half um so it was up and I think I had you know maybe a hundred people in the Discord um very very passionate about sharing their

ideas coming up with new ideas discussing and I would say a very respectful um very positive manner um so I think we we made like this really nice almost like a game design Community with the players where we would listen to

their feedback they'd be like hey this is too strong hey this is too weak why would I ever skip um this boss is unfair and I would try and listen to everything and I would uh really try and take it to

heart when when I heard stuff come up more than one time for more than one player I think it was pretty obvious that like you know admit that you're wrong the designer sometimes because um you know I'm I can't play this game as

much as 30 or 300 people can so yeah so that's how it started that's how kind of like the iron started getting sharpened with other people's iron um and it after it kind of exploded in popularity over that summer uh from all these streamers

playing the game so did the number of people that were testing the game um and all the attention and you know a lot of was hard to deal with but I tried to keep the same ideas of like try and

listen to everyone even if they're being negative try and listen to what they're actually saying about the design of the game and the balance and the changes that they want because really it just means that they're passionate about

having fun with this thing that I've made yeah were there any particular systems that you feel the state that they're in now basically is complete thanks to the community you know like there was just invaluable feedback that came through on

some particular system or even something specific as a boss or something like that right I would say literally all of them yes I think I think there's more after I went public with the game I I do think there are more numbers and and

Jokers and vouchers and bosses and everything that I changed then that I I let the same um so pretty much everything I have to thank um some passionate people that wanted to homeone this game to be something more than it

was um we at one point we threw out I believe half of the bosses about there's 30 bosses or 30 can't remember exactly how many but uh we we I basically deleted half of them because I was like yeah these everyone

was complaining about them they weren't good and then we had a huge brainstorming session on the Discord and and we're just trying to come up with different ideas for bosses um and I was trying to engage all the different

people to to contribute and then we had a big vote as to what people liked so I could kind of narrow it down a little further and uh from there I tried implementing some things and testing them myself and um so that's kind of an

extreme example of like it's almost like design democratization of design but I I try and guide those conversations as much as I can to as you were describing it I was like well that is very Democratic design process and something I've also noticed

about the batra community and you know no matter where you find them it's surprisingly non-toxic as well you know as far as games communities go um how tell me a little bit about your relationship with the community and how

you think you fostered what it seems like from the outside to be such a such a positive relationship I mean you know sometimes these things even with their the best of intentions to have a democratic design process can backfire

on us right like you know you bring people into the design process and then you go hey that's great feedback but we're going to take it in this direction and then all of a sudden it's like well but we all voted the other way you know

like how have you gone about setting those boundaries and keeping the expectations clear and you know fostering such a great and constructive Community I think anyone that was around the Discord at that time will know that I was also kind of a hardhead sometimes

and I would say like no like it's going to stay this way there are reasons why it's going to stay this way or no I'm going with this idea even if it's not the most popular idea yeah um I wanted

to hear ideas from all angles because you never know when you're going to hear like oh that's obviously the best idea that's definitely what the game should have but at the same time you know I still did feel like the designer and I

don't think that people got upset that I just like wasn't listening to them either I think I always tried to be respectful to people and um since the game launched I have not really been involved in the Discord as much because

there's like there's just there's too many people for my own mental health I can't I can't be around like online discourse this much anymore so I'm just trying to focus on the things that make me happy about game development which is

making a game and not necessarily spending so much time discussing it and debating it and um just getting back to basics about what I why I did this in the first place yeah yeah it's so funny like especially with the kind of success

that you've had right um there's this great phrase um from Greg maau the uh the writer of a book called essentialism and he says uh success begets opportunities and opportunities distract and that you know in his in his instance

he's talking about business opportunities and things like that but it can also just distract you from the things that you care about and your values and what is actually important to you at the end of the day yeah oh

there's so much truth in that I feel like I struggle with that a lot actually there's just you know there's so much noise now and M you know my identity is not I don't really talk about my identity very much that's a big reason

why I kind of don't want it to leech into my life in other ways um I'm I'm content with where I am and I want to keep you know I want to go back to those days when I was just like obsessed with

making the card jiggle good like I want to just make the card jiggle good again that's so I'm trying to like recapture that that feeling yeah no I impla I applaud you in setting those boundaries I think you have to you know as someone

who's been through like the cycle of having you know a degree of success with their game and you know being in the public eye and the industry's eye and stuff like it's um it can be a scary place and you really got to actively

defend those things that you care about I remember in my first job um CEO wonderful man he was he ran a studio of 80 people and I remember having a conversation with him and we were getting to these big long debates or

whatever in his office and he said to me at one point in frustration he was like you think I wanted any of this you think I wanted to be responsible for 80 80 people's like fam's wellbeing or putting

food on their table I'm a programmer I haven't program I haven't coded in 10 years and it was this incredibly vulnerable moment where I think like he did genuinely enjoy creating a a place for talent and I I don't think it spoke

to some deep you know depression or like um an anxiety or regret or anything but it just did highlight I think for me and it was a moment of vulnerability of him sharing like how quickly you can you can

slip into these moments of like oh yeah I'm not pro I haven't programmed in 10 years now I other thing and it just happened to me oh yeah I I feel so bad for the I know I know what he's talking

about and yeah yeah the poll is really strong to just like I don't know even like dealing with company things now and um there's just yeah there's just so much noise and it it is really easy to get sucked into all it I am kind of a

little bit getting sucked into some of it but I'm you know I'm still trying my best to keep a boundary and uh it's kind of impossible in some ways like um you know when I was working on this game and

all my previous games before that there was no temptation for any of this there was no distraction besides this it was just like you know get home from work oh I'm gonna boot up the computer and draw some silly pictures of jokers you know

there there was nothing else going on so man that sounds this it's amazing it was yeah it was so let's talk a little bit now I think this is a perfect segue into your relationship with play deack I mean

you're you're famously a solo developer on this but obviously there's a team behind you on the publishing side of things um assisting you with all and you know we will dive into some of the the hairier things that they've had to

handle as well like the you know the rating stuff and everything but talk to me a little bit about your relationship with playstack when they came on board and how it's assisted you in staying focused or ways in which maybe like you

know some fails along the way in which you've both had to sort of you know um uh correct your relationship along the way or refine how you work together right yeah well so to start with I was you know I posted this game on it was

like May 2023 and then within a few weeks I think the game only had like 300 or so wishless at the time um I got contacted by a scout from playstack I was getting contacted by a few other Publishers as

well so I was speaking to I don't know four or five uh in June and I was talking to all the devs that work for all these Publishers as well they were gracious enough to give me email addresses of a whole bunch of

different people they work with oh that's great past um and I heard play stack I'm not going to mention any other publisher names but playstack was the only one that like everyone that worked with them was like yes they I do not

regret working with them they did great amazing and I got to say in the time that I work with them I completely agree they're just a bunch of really good really passionate people about the industry um every time a Dev asks me

like hey would you recommend play stack I I'm like enthusiastically yes they know what they're doing they care a lot um like e for the terms of the contract I'm not even sure they were giving me the best offer but I just something

about um the pitch that they gave and the uh the words that I heard from other devs it just it convinced me that like yes for sure they are the right people to do this to partner with and I regret

none of it yeah hell yeah hell yeah and how did they that sort of other part of that that conversation did they play a role in sort of being able to keep you focused on game development and facilitating you there and you know

shiing other things around you know launching a commercial game and I mean the game had a bunch of hype leading up to launch as well right obviously the the hype was growing yeah um how how did they sort of help you keep your keep

your mind focused on drawing silly Jokers it was a struggle there's a lot of really difficult Parts about this right because this isn't like a unity game so porting was a big thing um you know it's not straightforward to Port

this game onto different platforms we launched on Nintendo switch Xbox PlayStation PC and Mac a week later um so that was you know a huge stress we we hired some help for um porting um his name's Martin he's in the

credits he's a wizard he's the best um I definitely wouldn't have been able to launch on a bunch of platforms without him shout out to Martin shout out to Martin you're the best um but yeah like that part was stressful um I

think there were a lot of parts that were stressful and I don't I don't think it's play Stack's fault I think it's it's because it was the first time I ever had a game in the public eye yeah

um if I didn't have a publisher I think I would have struggled with a lot of the same things it was really hard on my health for a long time I had I couldn't sleep for a long time I was having like

heart issues from anxiety for like months wow is this in sorry just is this in the leadup to release or Post Release leadup to release it was like Wow couple monting up what do you think that was was it the was it the pressure of was it

just actually the amount of work that you had to do and how much you were working to get over the line or was it the anxiety of you know the anticipation for release and the hyper uh it was

there's just so much work to do and I wasn't sure I could get it all done in time and then just's like stress about like so many different things can go wrong and I'm like this single point of

failure um and I'm just trying to keep it together you know and I'm like dealing with the public so much at that time because you're right there was so much hype leading up to launch it's just like this total pressure cooker while

I'm trying to maintain this relationship with the public um kind of like a healthy back and forth um they're helping me homeone the game and test it and get it to the state that I want it to be in

uh there's just there was a lot going on it was really bad for my mental it was bad for my health um the moment the game launched I basically I I booked the entire month of February until March

20th so it's like one month and I was like I'm just going to be available this entire time because everything's going to go horribly wrong and I need to be available to fix it and um it all went

like way way better than I thought it would and it's just been slowly my health and my mental has been slowly improving since then and uh yeah it was it was definitely like a huge struggle as a solo Dev you know I got to wear a

lot of hats but it also means I don't have a lot of people to take the slack um and we had this hard date for February 20th and it really was the perfect day to launch this game um it

was shortly after a nextfest but just like the that date was uh it was really hard to get everything done uh by that time yeah wow well congratulations on you know obviously Crossing that threshold what do you think you said that everything

seemed to go well if you can sort of attribute it to anything that you did or you know ways that you coded the game or something like that what was it or just like the sheer amount of work that you

put in before launch what why do you think things went so well for you post launch I'm not talking about the success I'm talking about things not falling apart right yeah sheer dumb luck um basically I I honestly think it it

easily could have gone horribly wrong like we we submitted builds to like major Publications for or um PlayStation switch and Xbox and those take a while to get approvals so yeah if we found a bug like two weeks before the launch day

which we found many then it's very possible that the our first review that's going to be revealed on February 20th or 19th or whatever the Embargo date was is just going to be like two out of 10 couldn't play it was a buggy

mess right yeah I had no way of knowing that um I had no way of knowing if the launch version of the game would be like that for all these people and we'd have to like wait a few days for a patch to

go through um so that's what I was expecting and the only reason that didn't happen I think is just we got we got lucky we tried to test as much as we could and it it just happened to work

and thank goodness so you know talking about all of this and what you've gone through and like coming from essentially what you would call hobbyist development before here A bunch of the folks who listen to this podcast are what you

would describe as H hobbyist developers or enthusiasts right that might not be their job just yet and then of course we have a bunch of solo developers it's a really great cross-section our listeners shout out to you all from games

Executives to people on the publishing side to you know just developers in the trenches of your favorite AAA games um but what would you say to folks who are looking at solo Dev what were the pits and the Peaks for you and anything that

you kind of learned that kept you sane along the way and helped you not only develop this game effectively and get it out but obviously you struggled with your mental health and physical health throughout it but how did you how did

you keep it together in the end um okay well I do have a bit of advice for like solo devs and and hobbyist devs and and whatnot um because I do get asked this a lot I think people like

even in my personal life they'll ask me like oh you know I'm getting into game development do you have any tips um I think the most important thing that I see people making the mistake of doing is it seems like people are too

eager to make a hit game and they don't even know if they enjoy The Hobby in the first place like you have to learn to love making a game that only you will ever play or only you and like a friend

will ever play uh because if you don't enjoy doing that you're never going to hone your skills enough to make a game that other people are going to want to play um so like I would say if I had any

advice learn to love the hobby because you're going to spend so much freaking time doing it so if you don't like it it's going to suck it even sucks if you love it like if you're doing it too much

um I also say like with my last few months of Deb how hard it was for me I don't really think I'm in much of a position to say what to do to avoid that because I wasn't able to yeah um I think

it's something that every solo Dev to some extent struggles with and I I don't know how to how to avoid it really um I wish I did I maybe I say yes too much to some things maybe um I'm too eager to

plan pencil in hours that I I'm not able to allocate uh I don't know what it is but I I'm still looking for the answer to that question myself so yeah look I think you know our our team under chip

solum is you know some of the most experienced developers that I've worked with same with Aro and it's it's just one of those things that you just know like what's the saying like 95% is in the last 5% right like and I think just

when you're a solo developer it's that that that hit is not soaked across an entire team you know it's concentrated on one person and it's just a it can be an absolute crap fire and really unfair I think to a lot of solo developers

having to interface with every single issue when you're at the at the intersection of Art and Technology trying to make it kiss as it like enters a box and you put the you know seal it over the top yeah and I I think it's the

kind of thing that people aren't really meant to experience is is being under the spotlight for that many people for that long and everyone just kind of expects like oh you should solve all of these problems because can you imagine

if you didn't solve some of these problems that means that you're like a bad developer and I think people don't realize that these are you know they're humans you make so many mistakes in your day-to-day life but they're all private

so it doesn't matter um so I don't know cut yourself some slack if you're Dev if you're a gamer and you notice that there's a bug in the game don't call the dev lazy because they're not um it's just hard it's just like a

really hard job to do by yourself it's hard to do with with other people too but it's definitely hard to do by yourself for other reason I realized earlier this year that I was getting burned out because like

the smallest like Forum post from some Community member like dragging one of our team members would like set me off in a rage for like half a day and I'd be like oh my god I think I'm a little bit

too sensitive to this some of the moment so protective of the team right now yeah yeah I there's so many solo devs that I've talked to um since starting this battle show Journey that like most of them have gone through a phase of

burnout at some point since then um it's so yeah I don't think that there's a lot of people that are well adjusted to to do this kind of work I think this is just the kind of work that you need to

be able to know how to distance yourself from yeah absolutely set up those healthy boundaries understand I think over the years as well you get better at identifying when you're kind of you know becoming fright at the ends or burning

both candles sorry both ends of the candle right yeah defin well look I do want to you were talking about problems right that arise um towards the end of release but you had a very significant and Infamous problem arise shortly after

release which was the game disappearing from storefronts right um tell me and for folks who don't know why don't you step us through the process of what that looked like on your end when the sort of the claxon started firing and something

was wrong and what actually happened and then we can talk a little bit because I know you've gone to Great Lengths post that to ensure that um you know gambling and B Ro never shall those two words ever meet um ever in the existence of

time and history so talk us through this process what happened well so a lot of this is off escad from me because it's play stack that deals with the ratings yeah that's a play stack problem right yeah yeah so it's not my fault don't

blame me um no but so early on in Dev I think it was way back in the fall um about a year ago so like six months-ish before launch um we submitted our ratings to the various boards to get

like a preliminary rating and I believe Peggy came back to us which is the European rating agency pegi um I believe they said you know it's three plus or something which is their lowest rating and then we're like

we emailed them and said can you just make sure um that this is the correct rating we want to make sure we get it right and they're like yeah three plus uh and then we launched February 20th 2024 and I think a week later or later

that week during launch week uh pegi adjusted the rating from three plus to 18 plus which triggered an automatic um an automatic system in all the storefronts uh like Nintendo switches e eShop got rid of our game so people

couldn't buy it because it was more than three ratings rating level um adjusted upwards so for like the most a portion of the most important week of our game's existence it would just like was unable to be purchased by a large contingent of

people because of these ratings changes yeah um and I think their justification for it is that it has gambling imagery and I guess for me I've thought about this a lot since then and just like understanding what does that mean

gambling imagery is that imagery of playing cards is that the word poker because poker isn't necessarily A gambling game only if you bet money on it in the same way that like watching Turtles race is a gambling game because

you could bet money on it um so is that the problem is is the problem that I use the term blind and stake because those are gambling terms um because there's no there's no staking or beding of actual chip

or like virtual chips nor is there anything to do with real money in the game yeah no like explicitly there's actually because I was trying to think about this as well ahead of our conversation and there's actually not a

single gambling like mechanic in batro funnily enough right yeah I think the the closest two things which which are kind of funny the closest thing is probably the um pack opening which is silly because pack opening uh like if

you buy a booster pack from a trading card game that is in my opinion that actually is gambling but you're spending real real money on it that's why it's real gambling in the game it's fake money and the reward is fake so there's

no like real monetary gain or loss there's nothing of True Value being gain yeah there's no input or output of real world value into the game yeah yeah so it's like a risk reward mechanic same thing with like The Wheel of Fortune

tarot card uh those like there's a couple things like that for but for the most part like the mechanics of the game are just based around normal risk reward Camp mechanics that you see in like every other Rogue like in existence all

of which don't have this rating so um I think it's unfounded I think it's especially frustrating when there are real gambling mechanics in other games that are rated lower than batro and I believe one of the people on the board

for Peggy was like in an interview they said that they were happy with How It All Shook out and it's like have you no morals like fix the real problem like leave our game at 18 plus that's fine but at least make some

of these games where people can spend money on booster packs like children can spend money on booster packs make them have an 18 plus rating as well yeah yeah it's interesting um you know this was the European agency but I you know as

you can probably tell from my accent I'm from Australia and something that a lot of people don't know about Australia is that we are literally the worst nation in the world for gambling like we have the highest rate of debt from gambling

and gambling spend per capita in the world for Any Nation um and like our laws are just around it they're just horrifically lack all of the Fantastic bands that came out of Australia like ACDC and Silverchair and all these like

they came up in a live venue environment that now you know at the local pubs and everything that basically doesn't exist anymore because now there's slot machines in every single Pub on the corner of every single Street like it's

really like one of Australia's kind of hidden to most folks who would think about us internationally but if you're in Australia it's a very very large problem and there's a lot of conversation happening at the legislative level at

the moment about banning advertising and everything in gambling so the destruction that gambling can have is like huge and I understand your frustration when you make a game that just has like some terminology from again games that like you know typically

in a casino or in other games might be utilized for gambling but they it's not necessarily gambling themselves um and they slap this 18 plus rating on you but then aren't pursuing the infinite slot machine games or things like that yeah

it's it is really frustrating and I don't know I I do see it a lot here in in Canada as well I watch a lot of hockey and um there's just so many ads for sports betting now like it's been

legalized here as a few years ago and I don't know it's like there's a lot of kids that watch watch those games like a lot of kids watch those games and they're seeing like their Heroes you know say hey bet with this betting

agency it's you know it's really fun um and then I just think like why are they going after my game like the you guys are aiming at the in the wrong direction like sure you hit me yeah okay I'm like

a bystander here but at least like try and get like the right people yeah and look the system of pulling the G down from the store and everything like you can like that's a great system to have in place you can imagine if they some

thing that like actually had genuine gambling mechanics in it or some horrific scene hidden in a game that like someone passed over and got it wrong it's but unfortunately you've just like you've you've caught some collateral damage of like these systems

and the decision that's Fallen yeah I I think there's a lot of people that thought Nintendo was to blame for this and Nintendo did nothing wrong here like I'm glad that that system's in place as well it just so happened to burn us here

but like it's a good thing that um if something does sneak through the the cracks that it that there is a fail sa for it so definitely Nintendo has no blame here same with any other digital storefront um that pulled the game

that's it's completely understandable why they did it I think it's it's the ratings board issue well there was something one element of this that you could control moving forward that you went and did um why don't you tell everyone about

that uh yeah so I've been thinking a lot about um you know as I was making this uh my company in the middle of like trying to sign a contract with playstack because I didn't want to sign with my

name I wanted to sign with my company um I was also thinking about like um what am I going to leave to my family uh you know trying to come up with a plan with some of the proceeds of this game and

trying to make sure some positive things come out of that and one of the things I'm very adamant about is that I don't want if I get hit by a bus tomorrow I don't want this game to be used to start

selling gambling products to be to start selling things that I'm like ethically opposed to so um we're writing into all of my um estate contract stuff so like my will and whatnot that you can't it can be used the baller IP can't be used

for gambling purposes it can't be used can't be SP um past on the side of a slot machine can't be used to sell like nfts um that kind of thing so um yeah I'm kind of working through that right

now because it is like kind of a long complicated legal processis I bet and I guess when there's a will there's a way right so you got to make sure that like once you're gone someone you have some Problem Child in

the future you have some some uh some disgruntled relationship with at some point you don't want them taking your game and like finding a way to make it a blockchain pay toe experience right so I have seen quite a few people say like oh

they can just do whatever they want after and that's not true like the way that I have it set up like you know I've hired lawyers to do this so no like it's it's Ironclad it cannot be used even if

I'm not here uh for those purposes so yeah hell yeah cool well that's got to feel good I'm sure yeah yeah it's I've been approached enough times by like some online nft Casino thing and they're like hey we think we want to

license the ballot we think you could make like a really good and it's like like no that's you just like spray them with the yeah yeah down all right well hey let's um I want to dive back into some more stuff around

you know batra's design and its treatment and everything because I there's just so much to unpack there but I really appreciate you being so open and generous with you know uh your experiences with play stack the the gambling sort of situation with people

and everything so I want to dive into a little bit of the aesthetic narrative thing here so batro obviously we spoke a lot about the juice and arcadey nature of it how good the game feel is around it and how much you worked on that but

something that's really evident from the start obviously is this retro aesthetic uh it's got you know even the the CIT kind of treatment that it has to it what what was the what was the inspiration around that is that something that your

previous games that you tinkered around with had had before how did you land on on that aesthetic because it really lends a whole lot especially to things like the interdimensional kind of aspects of the game and everything yeah

this is another one of those sheer dumb luck situations where at the time um I I think I played um what's it called tiny Rogues um and it had like a CRT slider effect in the uh menu and I thought that

was the funniest thing I was like a CRT slider that is hilarious so um I didn't know anything about shaders at that point so I thought like oh this is a great opportunity for me to learn shaders because there's a lot of good

Shader support with love 2D and uh I bang my head against a wall for like weeks and I figured out how to do it all and uh the CRT kind of like Barrel Distortion effect was like my first fora

into that so it was not because I'm really into playing like arcade games on cabinets it's not because I'm really in I was into like video poker as a kid or I was trying to emulate that feeling is

just because I was trying to learn a Shader and I was like that's kind of a cool effect I like that idea I should make it have like a CRT filter so really it was just dumb luck I think that

turned out that way we'll take it we'll take any dumb luck we can get considering how hard game da is yeah um another thing as well that's you know when we're talking about the aesthetic of the game and I mean it in the broad

idea of Aesthetics versus mechanics and things is that batro doesn't seem to have it's like a very distinct decision that doesn't have this kind of frame narrative around it like a common approach to a game like this or a Rog

light or a deck builder might have you know some kind of setting that you're in or some characters coming and even like the the way that it's tutorial or whatever you've got obviously you're a joker that's explaining things to you

but tell me a little bit about did you kind of just blast past that decision and it was never a consideration is there or was it something that explicitly you didn't want to you know like you've spoken about keeping it

simple being like a touchstone for you um right was that part of it talk to me about the fact that there isn't no real narrative or anything to the game so I've since learned after launching the game that this is something that people

seek out in games like in in not in games in general I understand narrative is in a very important part of games but in deck builder or Rog likee games yes I always just thought the narrative side of it was it was a little Superfluous

unnecessary getting in the way sometimes so it's it's one of those things where just like the complexity that I saw in other games it's just something I wanted to avoid in general the vibe kind of like the the setting and the vibe I

wanted to make really strong and um so I leaned into kind of of the whole weird retro dystopia vibe after I that started coming together Naturally by itself I started leaning more into that but I didn't want to make it into like you

need to save the Joker princess you need to free gymbo from his you know whatever I wasn't that wasn't kind of what I was going for and it seemed like not the kinds of things that I enjoy in games

anyway so it's more true to myself if I just kind of lay the mechanics bear gave it a Vibe and then that's the game itself and I think people kind of have responded to that yeah absolutely it and I think it's

worked really well as a streaming game too because that stuff doesn't get in the way as well right right yeah definitely and that wasn't intentional either it's not like a I see that quite a bit too like oh this is just like a

design streaming game because you don't have to pause it and there's like no dialogue or whatever it's no I just like those games um and I think just happens to to play very well in a in a stream

setting where there's a lot of decisions to make and there's not a lot of text to read or a lot of things to listen to where the streamer needs to like be quiet at the same time so yeah all right let's talk a little

bit more about the sort of the infamous late game of batro and how crazy it can get like I mean you're getting scores that are now just they're just formulas right because you can't even represent the numbers um talk to me a little bit about

how that came about in development and you creating a space for it and clearly leaning into it and and then also the reaction from the community just talk to me about that whole wild and crazy endgame and and how that came about so I

think that there's generally um in other games I don't like endless modes that much so first of all the game itself is really designed about beating anti-age which is like the kind of the final boss and then that's it

um so that's that's where what you're supposed to do you're just supposed to beat that but I also dislike in other games how you reach that final end point and you've got this like engine that's just starting to form and you're you

really want to push it a little further to see how far it can go but it tells you like no that's as far as you can go um I find that a little frustrating I know other people think that that's just

it's more satisfying in the long run if you kind of exercise some straint as a designer I understand that perspective but I also think there's another way around it and that is to allow people to test their crazy engine against an even

crazier enemy so expanding the score so fast that um it's incredibly unlikely that you're going to be able to survive very long at all uh because that way instead of I think what typically happens in these games that have endless

modes that don't scale like logarithmically or exponentially or geometrically or whatever I think what happens in those games is you get to a point where you're outpacing the the requirements or you're outpacing the enemies so much that it's just a game of

patience and you end up on the same run for like 15 hours and you don't play ever again because you feel like you solved the game yeah because it just that that one run didn't provide enough of a challenge exactly yeah it's it's it

gives you too much um in One Direction it's like candy for breakfast a little bit so instead make it so that it ends no matter what try again the point of this game is that you try again um and

it's much I think it's much less frustrating for you to be forced to stop on a defeat than it is for you to be forced to stop on a victory yeah yeah I love it I think um it was

Alis o Conor at Rock Paper Shotgun fantastic Rider um who proposed the or who stated the proposition of you know you beat antia and asks if you want to jump into endless as the game kind of saying what do you say we let this

beauty rip and see how much further she can go just sums it up perfectly that is perfect yeah that's exactly what I was thinking though is just like oh you think you got a good run like okay we'll

see that's kind of the idea it's really great and it does have that Vibe obviously Alice picked up on it and that's the way that I felt as well when I hit that point what so when you then

entered into that was that kind of like you letting go of kind of responsibility for the player then they're entering some kind of contract or agreement where they're like all right now I'm just going to go off and you know see what

she can do as um Alice put it and then you you're not too worried about like uh complications in balance or anything at that point and were you kind of just focused on up until ant8 how did you

treat that that postgame endless section it's such an interesting problem because um it's a great question so there's there's two things happening in the game right there's the anti- a game which everything is balanced around but then there's also the anti eight plus game

which it's almost like an entirely different set of um strategies and metas that you need to adhere to to make it very far in that world and because everything's balanced for anti eight like the normal endgame um it's just a

lot more shallow in terms of the gameplay styles that you can really lean into for that like higher Stakes um gameplay and I actually don't really think there's a really good elegant solution to it if I start making a bunch

of things that are only good after ant8 then the normal game suffers so I think there's a lot of give and take there and ultimately I think me leaning really hard into one of those ideas is better for the health of the game and

more fun especially because like I say this a lot but I made this game for me and I end my game after ant8 95% of the time only if like there's some crazy new thing that I've never experienced before

do I go past antia to just you know see how far this thing can go um so yeah and and I think a lot of people would be maybe a little upset at that because there are a lot of people that just go

past NTA and they want to see how far it can go and they're frustrated that there's just not like a lot of nuance in the ways that you can play there but um I don't know I think that's just part of

the give and take I think ultimately it's a net positive that there is an option to Go endless even if it's a shallower experience than if you were just told you're not allowed to keep going yeah no I totally see what you're

saying there completely agree something as well that happens with the endgame that we kind of touched on it before in the vein of game feel and that arcadey you know all of the effects that are happening when you know well effects are

popping off on cards and everything but at different speeds and things but I'm interested in hearing about how you ensured player comprehension of what was going down was still solid at that late game when crazy [ __ ] is happening on screen

and everything's popping off and interacting with each other did you find that players at that point in the game had such an idea and such a grasp of what their cards were going to do that you didn't have to do much work and that

the work that you'd sort of just done on you know player comprehension in the earlier stages of the game carried you through or were there things like design issues or comprehension issues specifically around like the ux or telegraphing what was going on in play

that was happening late game that you needed to solve yeah there's there's kind of two different um games happening here um depending on how much you played so the first game is there's all these different items and you're trying to

understand what they do and how they interact with each other you're trying to tease apart how the mechanics work so you play a hand you see some numbers flash it's on onx speed as well so you have time to read and parse exactly

what's happening in what order it will probably take you a little while to figure out exactly like okay that's what this Joker does okay that's what this what re-trigger means okay that's what multiplier means you know um so that's the first game I think in

batro is the Discovery process of how all these different things work so that you can make a model of all of those things in your mind and creating that model in your mind is really important because it also allows you that you know

you shut the game down you're going about your life you're at work and you think oh those two things oh those would work perfectly together because you have a model now you understand understand how all the puzzle pieces look and you

start putting them together maybe while you're playing maybe not while you're playing and then once you finally understood the shape of all these different puzzle pieces um when you play a hand you don't even really need to know you you don't need to read and

parse what's happening because you already know fundamentally what's going on on the screen it's just fun numbers and fire and and colors at that point it's just kind of like a victory lot for you so so at that point when you're you know at

the end game and there's all this crap going on on the screen it accelerates the speed at which the um all the animations take place um because I know that you're not actually really reading everything that's happening on the

screen it's just um you know it's just part of the model in your head you've already done all the work so now here's the fireworks and you get the final number yeah I love that concept of playing different games as well and like

how you've compartmentalized out like the different kind of Loops within the game and how they layer over itself you know we we often will talk about loops or layers but this concept of you know the player kind of multitasking

different games as they're playing is great yeah and it's that's my favorite part about Rogue lights is like um first of all interacting with all the fun art and all the fun ideas the first time you see them and then remembering all of

them and combining those ideas when you see a new item and saying like oh this new item would go really well with that previous item that I saw I think that's really the sauce in these types of games

so yeah yeah absolutely I agree um all right let's dive into some more technical stuff here so you know deck building games are often like we're talking about all the amazing things that can happen in the way that things

interact like so the complex State Management that's happening in deck building games and Rogue LS were there any technical challenges that you specifically faced you know managing that game State and all the player data you know even though obviously there's

no online or anything like that but any sort of War Stories of trouble with that stuff or was it a pretty smooth run um I think it's been pretty smooth I haven't had that many issues um porting was a nightmare but it

it's always a nightmare for everyone uh that's ever done a port so um I think in general it was actually really smooth it's like implementing touch controls was was weird because it was the first time I ever did that yeah um but no I

would say in general like a deck builder is not the most complicated type of game to create um you just have to make an interface that makes sense and then keep adding things to that kind of set of

criteria that you've created so I can just keep adding Jokers and it's pretty easy for me to do that now I will say though at one point I think the source code was like leaked it's not obis skated or anything but um and someone on

Twitter like posted this big long nested if statement and they're like oh my God I can't believe the batro source code but you know at the same time it works for me they dragging you on Main about your source code yeah they were they

were they were roasting me you know I may have deserved it but at the same time it's like it I've got a system and it works if it's dumb and it works it's not dumb yeah look I'm not a programmer

but one of the first things I learned about programmers when I started in video games is that every programmer thinks most other programmers code is garbage so yeah I'm sure look their their code isn't out there in the in the

world I'm sure we could find a bunch of programmers to drag them about their source code as well yeah yeah fine though okay what about some like the weirdest bug you encountered during development any wild tales about crazy

[ __ ] going down bonus point being from something trivial or simple as well they're my favorite ones um it's like the biggest one um it actually had a name it it was a bug for probably a year

I could not it was the weirdest thing uh I called it the white whale because it was like my way whale um so that's what everyone in the community called it too the WW bug um basically when you're

playing the game in the shop if you have like the normal Joker that then in the shop the normal Joker won't be able to show up it's like it's eliminated from the pool as soon as you get it um

and sometimes very very rarely it would still show up and it was so hard to reproduce it was like impossible to um to diagnose what the problem was until like many months later um it happened on stream while I was in someone's chat and

immediately I was like this is it so downloaded the VOD and I I reproduced all the exact steps that that streamer did and I asked the streamer for his seeds that I could like re reproduce it and finally figured it out and

um I I can't remember exactly what the problem was it was very stupid though and uh yeah it's just I remember that very vividly because there was like a whole lore behind that bug in the community too so special yeah that's

always fun when you could create some sort like really really um personify some bug as like some hideous villain some Aris of the community and development yeah yeah all right another great question I like to ask too um

what's one piece I mean this is your first commercial game right like it sounds like your first almost like completely finished and Shi video game as well um what's one piece of bad advice that you heard and and

specifically ignored during development bad advice that I ignored um I have one that might be a little controversial you don't have to name the person by the way but yeah I'd love to hear what it is well you might know what

it is I I don't disrespect this person by the way that said this I won't say who it is but someone um said something about how um when you choose the game that you want to make you should first

look at the industry and then pick the pick the genre like pick a genre of a game that's underserved yeah and I feel like it's really putting the cart before the horse to do it that way because um you should be making a game

that you're passionate about because if you're not passionate about the game that you're creating it's not going to be any good anyway I think you just kind of have to luck into the fact that you enjoy making a game that's going to

perform well on the on the market so yeah um and besides that I don't know if you should really even concern yourself too much with that if you're like an early you know if you're just making games and you're not you don't have

aspirations to like make it a career yet if you're just trying to learn just make games that you love and then you'll create your own voice for that so um what the first thing that happened when I you know went public is I was just

shocked at the amount of uh business strategy that goes into game development because I just never been exposed to a lot of it before and I thought I'd done something terrible terribly wrong because of that but looking back I'm

glad that I I did things the way that I did yeah hell yeah I think I read in an interview you once saying that you you hadn't even emailed anyone about the game yeah like I wasn't I wasn't telling

streamers about it no yeah yeah I love it it's be you know you speak about looking into things and I think you know there's there's a beautiful lesson here like I mean obviously there's a bit bit of Survivor bias and stuff that we could

fall into too but like this you've CLE near just developed a game and followed your love for it and it's happened to be in that perfect position where it was you know was serving a huge Market that was just waiting for something like

batro to come along yeah and uh you know since I was I do feel like an outsider still to the to the industry in a lot of ways and since I was especially leading up to that point I'm just kind of now

coming to terms of how um how big it really was um I I didn't think that this was like that crazy of a thing to happen and then you know as time goes on I look back and I see how some of my peers are

doing and how other games are doing on the market and it's it's just shocking to me like I don't know I just the more time goes on I'm just like what was so special about my game I I really don't

get how it performs so well critically um to deserve this like I've played a lot too and I like it but I don't know if it has the Mass Appeal that like it clearly does so it's just it's baffling to me the whole thing is

still baffling to me and the more context I I get the more baffling it seems I love that I won't name the game or the developers but I had some friends um visiting Melbourne and they this was a number of years ago and they just

shipped a game huge huge AAA game that was getting like Metacritic in the '90s um and you know it was the first the studio had had big hits before but this was like the first like critical and Commercial Success like bigger than

anything they'd done and when they're in Mel we went out for lunch and I was like oh what's what's next and they were like oh we're doing a sequel and I was like oh W that's really exciting and I could

see on their faces that they were not excited when I asked why they were like because we have no idea how the first one met a Critic at 95 whatever it was like we thought the game was terrible we

have no idea how people like thought it was that good and now we've got to repeat the process and they ended up doing so um but like yeah man it's I I I I've heard from other developers who've

you know sort of reached that point where you're like oh my God okay I knew I was on to something but I didn't know it was going to resonate that well yeah well just there's just so many stories

of like that I can think back on in my own Journey that are just I really do believe a lot of it was locked and I think like can I I don't know if I can do that again like that's not that

shouldn't be the the goal anyway and I don't think that would be the goal like I even sometimes think like oh I should just like flip a coin and whether or not I even release my next game I should

just make it and then put it in fer keep it there yeah just like delete the library if it like comes up Tails or something yeah like because that's not I feel like that's I got to hold on to

that because that's really not what it's about and then that's probably the way that I can make something good yeah again is is by you know keeping the same process that I've always had so yeah well I'm not sure to friends who have

had similar degrees success as you especially ones that have come from like really humble Indie Beginnings or like they've had a huge astronomical success like this you know culturally and commercially and the pressure to like then deliver on the sophomore it's like

you're the guy you're the person who created you know balatro um what's next what's GNA happen like you're the notion that for you games is a journey rather than a destination and like what you've done to protect that for yourself and

set those boundaries and take some time and you know even things like you know protecting your identity and things like it's um I I imagine that pressure must be immense but surely it sounds like you're starting off in a really great

Direction there by you know already your your motivations for making games are in the right place I I hope so um these are all kind of prophylactic things too like I'm doing these things because I know I probably should but I also do feel the

pull to like um get stuck working on a particular thing because that's what you know it's s it will be successful if we do it that way right yeah there's a lot of pressure to do it like that so so

like for example I'm working on uh a big update for the game for 2025 like a big content update um I'm not going to reveal too much about it here but um I do still genuinely enjoy working on this

game but I still have some of the same thoughts and fears about like how's this going to be received um you know is this am I going to be able to do what I did before with with this update um should I

even be thinking about those things is that just getting in the way of of the process so yeah I still struggle with those I was gonna ask you you know usually I might ask people sort of what's next but the way I was going to

phrase that question for you was are you still enjoying working on batro and I guess what are the elements if so what is it that you enjoy in this process of or this stage of development than you know as opposed to what you would enjoy

pre-release um yes I'm still enjoying it um when I was doing the mobile Port I definitely was not enjoying it I think I was I was definitely burnt out on that part of it yeah um but at this point I'm

back into like the bread and butter of why I was making this game in the first place I get to do art I get to come up with creative ideas I feel like I get to surprise people now which is fun that's

something I never really experienced before um so yeah I'm like I I love this job and I'm sure once I stop loving it I will stop but it seems like one of those things where if I can keep this design

and implementation uh Habit that I've created I think I can work on it for a long time and still love it so yeah um I do feel like I'm going into the unknown a little bit because this will now be

the longest project I've ever worked on and I don't really have any plans of stopping anytime soon either so I don't know what that means necessarily for my motivation if it's if it's going to be any different if it's going to be

easier um I'm just I don't know I'm just excited for it yeah hell yeah well like not so much talking about what's next but sort of what like how is this going to shape your development whether it be

on batro or other things moving forward I think an interesting question I ask at this point is how's working on batro influenced your approach to game design or your development philosophy going forward like is there a new de design

philosophy or truism that you've learned on this project that you'll be taking forward uh yeah definitely um if I'm making another public commercial project I want to involve um players play testers that kind of thing earlier in the design

process interes um because they're they're such a good tool for uh they're a good barometer for [ __ ] they they will be able to sniff it out immediately if something doesn't work they won't be hesitant to tell you it doesn't work um

a lot a lot better than like showing friends and family because friends and family it doesn't matter how awful it is they'll just be proud of you that you made something but the general public like your intended target audience will

be ruthless and that's exactly what you need um and it took me a year and a half before I started getting that kind of feedback and it probably would have gone a lot quicker if I involve those people

earlier in the process so whatever my NE next game is um that's a lesson I will definitely takeways get people involved in the creation process earlier to CH that's really interesting to challenge that for a second it does

sound like a bunch of the success that you either locked your way into or have found through this project um yourself has been the fact that when you went to the community there was quite like a strong design base for this game already

do you find that there's a and so it's interesting to me that you do want to bring them on earlier I'm not saying obviously it's bad decision or anything but like to unpack that a little bit do where do you find the balances for

yourself at least in you know or potentially in development for going to a community with something having a strong base that is enough there for them to chew on and when you say bring them in earlier in the development phase

but sort of what more specifically are right are you thinking in regards to phase of development yeah so there is like a specific kind of point I'm thinking here and that's um cuz you're right you don't want to involve them so

early that it just kind of gets beige right you don't want them to design like the core of your game for you yeah what I mean by that is like by the time I had these people involved I already had like

90 Jokers implemented right okay and implementing that much content before you're sure that the system is even worthwhile is dangerous because that's like a lot of wasted potential time if you just need to cut it so I would have

saved a lot of time if I made all of these different mechanics and then added just enough content for people to start playing it and test it to see whether or not I want to keep those different um

interlocking mechanics before I start implementing a whole bunch of content for them so um so yeah I do think like keep it a secret until you have a prototype a a fully functional prototype but not so long that you need

to throw a whole bunch of crap in the garbage if something goes wrong uh I think there is a balance there though you're right definitely yeah yeah all right cool um all right I think a a couple questions maybe to round it out

especially considering that you're obviously the artist of this project and hearing about your art background and the joy that illustrating and creating the art for new Jokers brings you what are your favorite Jokers and maybe let's let's do it from a an aesthetic

perspective like the visuals um or the treatment of them and then maybe a couple you can throw me like just fun effects or something like that is a right so I have a special place in my heart for the two banana jokers in the

game um I I just like making there's something really fun about coming up with an idea for a joker and then coming up with art that fits it or vice versa it's always so like natural and uh organic when that happens and the banana

ones are just they're these it's this anecdote that I've I've always loved to tell people like oh you know about the grow Michelle banana like you know the flavor of banana candy that's not actually based on the banana that you

know it's from the banana from the 50s um so I'm just like a giant nerd basically but um so I love that anecdote and I was like oh I want to put that in the game uh so I made you know the

banana art and I think it's hilarious and I think it's like a fan favorite as well both of the bananas yeah I really like that one I like um what's another one dusk it's like uh this this evening

scene in the in the desert it's based on uh I did a road trip down to I used to have this this Toyota Previa van that I converted into a camper and me my partner we drove down to

Arizona and uh we spent a couple nights in the in the National Forest there amongst a bunch of cacti and that's it's kind of tattooed on my brain that that's scene So based on that it also has that

one has a real you know when we talk about the memories that we have of playing cards and everything for some reason like that kind of imagery on like a deck of playing cards you know like say you're you stop at some Roadhouse in

the Arizona desert and they might be selling like a deck of cards that has backs or something it's um yeah it's it's funny it doesn't it's obviously not a playing card face but it it still feels very at hard on a playing card

yeah yeah I like I try and put so many of my like most of these ideas for these playing cards they come from my life like there there things that have happened to me or people that I know or

images that I've seen um and it's over the course of like you know two and a half years that I was making these Jokers there's a lot of life that I exper while I was making these and it

all kind of went into the game so um the jok is are all just local thk deep law basically honestly yeah basically that's what they all are it's um you know I we grew a bunch of black beans in our

garden and that's why I came up the idea for turtle Bean is one of the Jokers um or um ice cream it was like a super hot day and I was really craving some ice cream so I thought I would I would draw

the Joker um I don't know it's just like there's all sorts of little every Joker probably has a little anecdote associated with it with the reason why I came up with that idea usually it's kind of dumb but like if it's executed well I

don't think that those anecdotes are are dumb I think they're kind of interesting and they give it flavor and I'm kind of the thing that ties them all together so they do feel like they're all tied together at the same time so so yeah um

they contribute to that artistic voice that I was talking about earlier and there's also you know we were also discussing the the construct or the concept and of a card and how much like a playing card and how much that's in

player's mind so it's it's weirdly powerful when there are Joker's that isue that that form of a playing card too like say the to-do list or right the golden ticket or things like that even the one that's I forget the name of it

but that's ripped in half I remember seeing that the first time and I was like oh whoa cool it kind of you know opened up a world of possibility in this small but meaningful way for the game yeah and um like the design of the

Jokers is I spent such a long time on it and it's like character design almost um yeah but yeah no and I know the vibe you're talking about too like they definitely kind of have like the the silly playing card lore feel to them um

I had all these rules too like one of the rules was uh the word Joker has to actually show up on every card so like the Todo list the first letter of each of the things on the to-do list spell

out the word Joker oh of course I hadn't even clicked with that that's so good yeah so I had all these like weird design rules and um I was still able to play around with it so much and fit a

lot of my life into it so so visually those are my favorite things effect wise there's some really like my favorite one by far is uh period doia which is like when you look at a tree or a cloud and

you see like a face because humans are really good at picking up um really really good at pick up patterns of seeing faces and things and the cards on like it's parodia itself has a bunch of playing cards arranged in the shape of a

face and it makes all cards face cards so it it tied in so organically with the effect um that's definitely one of my favorite allaround Joker design ideas just so perfectly very cool well yeah it's amazing how people have taken to them

and you know you were talking before about expectations on your new update but I mean the packs that came out recently with you know like the different artwork and it's obviously they're just aesthetic you know um new playing cards um which is such an

obviously brilliant idea and it's right there right but the various games and bringing bringing those IP into into malro like seeing that receive so well and seeing it integrate so seamlessly into the experience is just so cool yeah

that was probably the coolest experience in all this is like these people that I've always looked up to like Ed MCM and concerned ape and the slay the Spire people and the Among Us team and everyone uh cdpr and like being able to

go into meetings and and meet these people and talk you know we were able to talk design with some of these people and like concern dat made the art for for that set of cards he's like a fan of

of my game I'm like a huge fan of his game it just every developer solo developer development team that I've interfaced with over the past year especially with these collabs they're just so willing to give um they just

want to be part of this big collective experience I just think it's so cool that we were able to do this for free and everyone's just so on board with it everyone just so psyched about it and players love it and I love that I'm able

to share you know some of these games that I love in this really unique way um yeah it's been great yeah it's something in video games that I think we really take for Grant tonight and especially I feel so

privileged on this podcast talking to you know folks like yourself and the other guest that we have is when you're a developer in video games and I kind of want to say like at almost any level you don't even have to have the degree of

success that you've had obviously it opens doors for you and this podcast is a function opens doors for me as well to be able to speak with these people have these conversations but video games so many of our heroes are so accessible and

not only that but so many of them are so there's just something about game development and it's hobbyist I think it's humble beginnings as a hobbyist sort of endeavor and you know the fact that maybe it was like um land basted

and relegated out of main pop culture for so long but um I think everyone is so accessible I sometimes I sit around you know like at industry events or I'll be at of dinner with some folks or hanging out with friends or whatever and

I look around and I'm like these people are kind of like the Spielberg or the Terren Malik or like the Katherine of video games and they're just like my friends or like I'm going to hang with the Tom Green Oh the sorry the Tom York

of video games today and they're just totally accessible to us it's wild it's really that we really privileged to have yeah I know what you mean it's I've been just shocked at like how down to earth and how willing to just talk about

whatever like all these big names that I've seen are and um even yeah just am one that I talk to in the industry doesn't matter how how much success they've seen it just seems like everyone gets it it's just I think the fact that

it's kind of like traumatic a lot of parts this are traumatic people come together through trauma and I think everyone kind of understands like this yeah this kind of sucks in a lot of ways but we're we're in it together and we

know how it goes and we want to all help each other so yeah it's funny that you say that because the reason that I've always thought that it would be the case or one of the main reasons as well is

because we have a common enemy which is this thing we talking about before which is just shipping the [ __ ] game it's so so like as you've mentioned sure it's traumatic but even just the difficulty level of it and the fact it feels like

we're really in this it feels like a PVE experience as opposed to a PVP experience that's for sure yeah I think a lot of people in Game Dev realize that it's not about like how successful the game is it's just the accomplishment is

shipping a game it's finishing it to 1.0 it's whether or not it's successful it's it doesn't make it any easier or harder um to ship the actual game itself like like a a game that ships is you know

it's it's worth a ton of respect so I think that's why people respect each other so much regardless of you know the how how big they've gotten in in the industry so well I think there's probably no better segue to wrap up this podcast

than we're going to find there so on that note uh congratulations local th on first of all shipping your first commercial game on the success it's had um whether that be commercially obviously culturally the huge impact it's had or critically which

it's funny to hear you don't agree with like really um phenomenal work and thank you so much for being so generous with your time and so um vulnerable and open in sharing your development experience and your thoughts about the

game it's just been wonderful chatting with you yeah you too this has been great thanks for having me of course all right have a wonderful day you too