Tag: indie

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

Weird Balatro Deck Peeking Trick Discovered

A trick was discovered a scant few days ago in Balatro that will outright tell you what the top card on your deck is, it’s been in the game since the original demo release, and its an intentional inclusion by the game’s creator.

One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.

Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!

The trick in action — the next card is a 10 of Hearts!

Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.

How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.

Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:

Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):

Annapurna Interactive’s Entire Staff Resigns

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s been a while since I, your favorite amorphous neon-green alien, have presented my whimsical take on Earth gaming news. I’ve mostly settled into an editorial role, consuming, digesting and excreting the work of others in an un-credited and, I assure you, sanitary capacity. This, as opposed to doing so for the news posts of other websites, which was time consuming, space filling, and of dubious interest to readers. I’m a humble amoeboid and can admit when something isn’t working.

But this story, from PC Gamer but no doubt from plenty of others too, is huge! Everyone at popular and prolific publisher Annapurna Interactive walked out! They released tons of games! They published Kentucky Route Zero! They published Stray! And Donut County, Outer Wilds and Wattam! And a lot of other games too!

Annapurna Interactive publishes adorable and somewhat upsetting animal imperiling adventure game Stray.

The surface reason is dismay over abandoned plans by owner Megan Ellison to spin their company off from owners Annapurna Pictures. If there’s some deeper reason, I wouldn’t have any way to speculate. Annapurna Interactive was highly successful, president Nathan Gary was promoted from it to head their movie-making parent, and screenplays based on their games are in production, including an animated movie based on Stray.

I’m sure there’s some deep story there behind literally everyone leaving the company. I’d presume the Pictures parent not wanting to lose access to such a useful source of projects, but the employees feeling betrayed by that? I can only speculate, in a way that gets more irresponsible the further I go, so I’m going to stop. Annapurna Interactive had a good, consistent track record of hits, and didn’t seem to alienate the studios publishing through them. That counts for a lot, from a publisher.

Keita Takahashi’s current project To A T

The walkout leaves a number of games currently in production in a state of 𝙿𝚄𝙱𝙻𝙸𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙼𝙱𝙾, including always-delightful Keita Takahashi’s upcoming To A T. Let’s hope everything works out for all involved.

Gamefinds: World of Goo Demake for Pico8

We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

It’s continually amazing what people manage to make within the modest resources of the Pico8 fantasy console virtual machine. This time it’s a decent demake of 2DBOY’s World of Goo, by VirtuaVirtue!

The objective is the same as the original: drag goo balls to build structures, to try to reach the pipe, which will then suck away all the excess goo balls on your construction. If you have enough left over, you win and get to move to the next level.

It’s quite challenging, it gets harder much faster than the original game. The physics of the goo constructions is much wobblier and bouncier than WoG, and goo balls don’t stick to walls here, so you’ll have to spend more goo balls on balances and counterweights. But it’s certainly not a bad thing to play around with for free!

World of Goo Demake for Pico8 (itch.io, $0)

Robo Quest Review

This is a review of Robo Quest played with a press key by the developer.

Spelunky 64

The thing about Spelunky 64, a reimplementation of Spelunky on the Commodore 64, that gets me is how smooth the scrolling is. Smooth multi-directional scrolling isn’t easy to do on the C64 without hardware assistance, but here it handles it without apparent problem. Here is a 7-minute demonstration from Just Jamie:

It’s not the only obstacle Paul Koller (PaulKo64) had in making this surprisingly faithful recreation. It contents itself with the basic Atari-style joystick, with a single overloaded button. So up is used for jumping, tapping the button attacks, holding the button uses an item, down+button takes out a bomb, and up+button places a rope. It’s not perfect, and you have to be really careful in shops, but it doesn’t work badly.

BastichB 64K has an interview with its developer on Youtube (7 1/2 minutes):

Here is a complete playthrough (28 minutes):

Spelunky 64 is on itch.io for $3. To play it, you’ll need a Commodore 64 emulator, or a physical C64 and a way to get the game image onto a disk.

Balatro University’s Beginner’s Guide to Extremely High Scores

It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:

The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.

Irrelevant note in passing: the Youtube ID for this video contains four consecutive lowercase ‘u’s.

High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.531³⁰, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.

So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.

With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!

The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.

It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.

Two Indie Adventure Games Worth Your Time

This is a double review of Underground Blossom and the Many Pieces of Mr. Coo, Blossom was played with a retail key, Mr.Coo was played with a press key.

0:00 Intro
00:15 Underground Blossom
2:12 The Many Pieces of Mr.Coo

Grey: A FPS on a Commodore 64

Grey is what the subject line says: a FPS, running at an acceptable framerate, on a Commodore 64, without a Raspberry Pi or other hardware to help it out. Here is its thread on Lemon64. Have a look (24 minutes):

How is it possible? Well, it’s not running 60fps for one. Updating the whole screen in one frame on a C64 is hugely challenging, but fortunately FPSes can look satisfactory running at slower framerates. It’s not Quake-level graphics, or even Doom, it’s more like Wolfenstein 3D in ability, and it’s confirmed that it uses that style of raycasting. And on top of all of that, it doesn’t use hi-res resolution, which would be really slow on an unmodified C64. It seems to use character tiles to fake a kind of low-res display. But when you’re trying to get a game running on a 1 MHz machine with 64K of RAM, tricks and shortcuts are not only necessary, but rather laudable. What a hack!

This is a work-in-progress, with a demo of the game available in a recent Pateron-available issue of Zzap 64. No source code is available yet. Let’s hope for continued development!

The Long Time Coming of Long Gone Days

For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Camila Gormaz and Pablo Videla from This I Dreamt to talk about Long Gone Days. We spoke about how the project began, what it was like creating a game in a modern setting and trying to balance the story with the JRPG-inspired combat.

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