So i got really into Balatro and I had this idea to try and make a Balatro copy since it seems that the only calculations ths game does is simple addition and multiplication of a few different values, the rest of the gameplay is on the player to plan things out.
I thought that it could be an interesting way to make a wg game. My idea was that since there are different decks in the game (like different starter characters in a rouge-lite) that each one could have a different character to fatten up.
In Balatro you have antes which are like levels and each ante has 3 blinds you need to beat which are like individual fights within that level. To beat a blind you need to score points and you can get better joker cards that in different ways multiplicate the score.
The gameplay would looks something like this, you’d score points and that would equal to some food that this character would eat. You would see them get fuller and after finishing an ante, they would digest that food and gain a proportional amount of weight for the food you managed to feed them.
The characters would be all female and the max weight will be around 300lbs on a good run. The stuffing will have their stomach grow to a maximum size of something a little more than if someone was 9 months pregnant with quadruplets, i don’t have a better comparison.
Here are some issues that i might still need to figure out:
Programming
It could be a challenge to make the different cards in the hand you hold as they need to have information in them about their suit and rank. They would also need to be removed from the deck when pulled. Not to mention upgrading them or having 2 cards with the same suit and rank.
Visuals
While the core programming mechanics seem easy as this game has a gameplay loop, the visuals might be hard to do. Balatro has those nice movements and shaking of the cards while you move them or when they activate and that might be annoying to make it look aesthetically pleasing
The feeding/weight gain
In Balatro if you have a good combo of joker cards, they can give you crazy good score. This is an issue if the score would be used as food. You getting ridiculously high score on early levels is one of the many fun things about Balatro and I don’t know how to go around it. There probably will be a cap on how much you can feed the character in one ante, but then what that cap would be? Let’s say you have in the blinds 300, 450, 600 points to score in that one ante. Would the cap be twice combined value of the needed points, three times? What then about you getting 30k points in a blind that needs only 600, you would lose most of the points that you score. I could have so after some point, the conversion of score to food isn’t 1 to 1, but is only a fraction, and it gets lower the higher it gets.
The gameplay/layout
On the game side i could go fully Balatro clone, or try to make some changes in the core mechanics and shift things around to make it more original. At the moment I don’t know what I could really change besides a few ideas for joker cards i have
If you’d like to help with any of the problems I have, i’d appreciate it.
This idea will be shelved for a while since i’m really busy nowadays and i don’t know how fast the programming will go.