To celebrate 2 years of Balatro, creator LocalThunk reflected on dropping out of an engineering program to make games: ‘Even if I could warn myself I’m not sure what I could have said to prepare for the insanity’
Even two years after release, Balatro is one of the biggest and best roguelikes going—there may be no one more keenly aware of that than developer LocalThunk, who’s managed to keep a low profile despite his game selling millions of copies and scoring crossover after crossover.
In a recent anniversary blog post titled “Bad Grades,” LocalThunk looked back on his earliest forays into game development. “I think about that version of myself a lot now,” he wrote. “I didn’t know what was coming and even if I could warn myself I’m not sure what I could have said to prepare for the insanity. I’m not even sure if there’s a lesson to learn.”
His first game was a four-word ladder game in command line, something he cooked up during an Intro to Computer Science class. He “wasn’t a good student” by his own admission, but it inspired him to drop out of the engineering program he was in to pursue a degree in programming. It set his education back a year, but he was passionate about it—engineering, on the other hand, was a bore.
“It was hardly a choice at all,” he wrote. “I wasn’t any good at [programming], nor was I aware of what may await me after graduation, but … I had created a few programs that convinced me this is the thing for me. I want to make things with code.”
