While I understand the sentiment of Playstack and LocalThunk to take down these kind of ports, it's a shame for the community because this will only make the game grow more.
geoffpado · 4h ago
It doesn’t sound like they did? The author seems to be proactively not releasing out of respect for LocalThunk, not out of fear. (And certainly not because they’ve already been sent a takedown or anything.)
kinduff · 4h ago
Because he didn't published it, but there are other similar ports that have been taken down.
What legal standing would they even have, if the game were simply named something different from "Balatro"? Game mechanics aren't copyrightable, and the game assets are literally just playing cards...
ronsor · 3h ago
The clear solution is to not copy every aspect of the original and also release your port under a different name.
This was painful to read, and I am so sorry for the author.
I was fortunate enough to break my Balatro addiction before it had gotten this far along, but others are not so lucky.
yjftsjthsd-h · 4h ago
What about this reads as addiction? This is clearly a tech demo, not something someone would do to let themselves play more of the game.
poolnoodle · 3h ago
I believe the comment you replied to was meant in a humorous way.
jimbob45 · 2h ago
And others are like me who wanted to play but couldn’t because of the nauseating effects of the graphics.
azhenley · 6h ago
This is what I need more of from the internet.
im3w1l · 5h ago
I think floating point is viable - balatro doesn't exactly perform billions of floating point operations per second.
EA-3167 · 5h ago
I also love Balatro, and can say that's shockingly good work especially considering the limitations of the platform. Clearly a labor of love, and I love it.
Dwedit · 5h ago
If you're hitting sprite limits because you used up all the sprite slots, you're doing something wrong. Sprites are for moving objects that need to exist outside of grid alignment. For steady objects, put them in a background layer. If you need a different alignment than 8x8 tiles, you can use two overlapping layers to get 4-pixel horizontal alignment instead.
anyfoo · 2h ago
I’m one of the people that don’t “get” Balatro. I do get how to play it (to a certain level at least), and I’ve certainly been drawn to a bunch of rogue-like games, some of which I still play (Into the Breach for example), but Balatro is just… too distilled for me, to a point where it’s almost absurd.
It’s literally “number go up”, there’s barely any “fluff”, and that bugs me for a reason.
In that regard, it reminds me of cookie clicker, although it distills different aspects. That, too, I stopped playing pretty quickly. I saw coworkers who would play it all the time in the background, and that kind of put me off. Almost philosophically.
Balatro has more “game” than Cookie Clicker, but I’m still slightly repelled by its relatively direct “number go up” aspect. (“Repelled” is a bit of a strong and rude word, but I couldn’t think of anything better right now. I don’t hate Balatro.)
Would reduce max score to 400M and you'd have to round 0.25 up or down. Would probably want to drop the 0.01 cards too.
super cool project
https://mattgreer.dev/blog/making-a-shooter-for-the-ereader/
For example, this C64 port was taken down: https://ko-ko74.itch.io/balatro-for-the-commodore-64-c64
https://ko-ko74.itch.io/balatro-for-the-commodore-64-c64
I was fortunate enough to break my Balatro addiction before it had gotten this far along, but others are not so lucky.
It’s literally “number go up”, there’s barely any “fluff”, and that bugs me for a reason.
In that regard, it reminds me of cookie clicker, although it distills different aspects. That, too, I stopped playing pretty quickly. I saw coworkers who would play it all the time in the background, and that kind of put me off. Almost philosophically.
Balatro has more “game” than Cookie Clicker, but I’m still slightly repelled by its relatively direct “number go up” aspect. (“Repelled” is a bit of a strong and rude word, but I couldn’t think of anything better right now. I don’t hate Balatro.)