It's been a little over three weeks since the launch of the hit roguelike game Baratro. Just last night, I won a 350 million point hand, and it's still not enough. Others are clearly hooked on the deckbuilder: scores and strategies are still regularly discussed on PCG's Slack channel, and the game itself has sold more than 500,000 copies in just the first 10 days of its launch.

Despite making the best poker deck-building roguelikes, solo developer Localthunk told PC Gamer last month that he doesn't play poker at all. This is surprising! But given how meticulously designed the game is, and how well it avoids many of the complaints I've had about other games in the genre, I'm sure he's at least a fan of deckbuilding.

"Balatro was the first deckbuilder I ever played!" said LocalThunk at a Reddit AMA held yesterday on the r/games subreddit. Instead, he says that watching Northernlion on YouTube play the slot machine roguelike "Luck Be a Landlord" and liking its core mechanics was a big inspiration for Balatro. "...... After that, I decided not to play any other games in order to delve into the design space myself. About a year and a half into development, I played "Slay the Spire" for the first time to learn how to support the controller.

Despite assuming that some of the choices made in "Balatro" were in direct response to classic deck-building mechanics, it turned out that fresh eyes working without knowing the mechanics of the genre's big names achieved similar results. This is fantastic.

Elsewhere in the AMA, LocalThunk confirmed its plans to continue working on the game through updates and new features, and said it already has a number of ideas for future directions to develop Balatro, including new challenges and a daily run mode. However, the next step planned appears to be a balance path to alleviate the high scoring runs that tend to be dependent on the RNG.

LocalThunk also released one particular statistic that puts my 45 hours to shame: "This game has been played on steam for over 1500 years at this point!" Not bad for someone's first deckbuilder.