After selling 1 million copies, Balatro creator admits it’s “held together with hopes and dreams” as game devs rally around the roguelike’s beautifully nightmarish code

“If it’s dumb and it works then it’s not dumb!”

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With 1 million copies sold, Balatro has cemented itself as the roguelike hit of 2024 - despite the fact that its underlying code is apparently “held together with hopes and dreams.” After some examples of the game’s beautifully nightmarish code hit the internet, game devs are rallying to say, basically, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

The original tweet that spawned all this discourse has since been deleted - probably smart - but the gist is that Balatro has bespoke code for many objects where modern programming standards would typically suggest that you build some universal ways of handling those objects. That is agrossoversimplification, and thisbreakdown from game developer Sean Barrettwill give you a much smarter overview of what’s happening here, but that’s the gist.

Balatro developer LocalThunk has been quick to cop to the idea that the game’s code is messy,noting thatit’s “held together with hopes and dreams” andjoking that"they won’t teach you that in a fancy Software Engineering course." But game developers are rallying around the idea that it’s never really been about creating clean code - if it works, then that’s enough.

Remember the goal is to ship games, not make the neatest and most elegant code routines. https://t.co/mwKeWi3We9April 23, 2024

I’m working on a personal project in which I have forbidden myself to work beyond the negative XYZ axis so I don’t have to deal with obnoxious math problems. Only positive values.If it works, is easy to debug and performance is not an issue, then it’s the right decission. 👍 https://t.co/zMBY4Ktvl4April 23, 2024

If Balatro was at the top of Steam, I can only imagine it made at least a few million dollars. I don’t know of any clean code enthusiasts who can boast such earnings from their own products. They usually earn from consulting and selling books on clean code.Telling, no? https://t.co/8nRTOOcMMJApril 23, 2024

Ultimately, that’s whatLocalThunk figures, too. “It’s not perfect but I know where every single thing is and I’m the only one that needs to maintain it, so it makes sense to me. If it’s dumb and it works then it’s not dumb!”

Wespoke with LocalThunk about Balatro’s ingenious twists on pokerearlier this year.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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