Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solitaire

localthunk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 164 posts

Re: Solitaire

#61

Post by jerf »

IsTom wrote: post #56
exitb wrote: post #9

It really does work that way. It’s a perfect game if you have ~25 minutes to kill. It’s fairly complex, but doesn’t really require player to keep much information between runs. I hate going back to a game after a few weeks only to discover that I no longer remember how to play it.

> 25 minutes Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).

As you go up the antes, the number of viable strategies decreases, until it narrows down to just one or two a number of antes quite a ways before the "end".

IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.

Re: Solitaire

#62

Post by jerf »

Arainach wrote: post #8
xnx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played. More than Universal Paperclips?

Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once. It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available" The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automati…

The "time boxing" is coming to be one of my favorite aspects of the roguelite genre. It's a nice structure for a combination of a deep and compelling game, that opens up at a reasonable speed, but also doesn't call for 80 hours to "finish" it. I like JRPGs but even so they quite often overstay their welcome. Death may wipe nearly all your progress but you can easily try again in another timebox.

(I played some of the classic Roguelikes, and spent a lot of time with Angband, but that was one of their problems... winning still took many hours, could easily be dozens, and so death became very scary. They were on to something, but the modern rebalancing of "hand it all out more quickly, and resolve the game in an hour or two and let them come back" seems a much more practical approach in a lot of ways.)

Re: Solitaire

#63

Post by jerf »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #27
havblue wrote: post #21

"To force players to get out of their comfort zone and explore the design of the game in a way they might not if this were a fully unguided gaming experience." It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing dra…

I mean, that might be the intent on paper, but when I was going through a game like Dead Cells, I still had specific weapons or layouts that I was especially effective with--and in practice that just meant that if I didn't manage to get my favorite bat or nun-chuck weapons to drop, there was a good chance I wasn't going to be able to complete that run.

Non-twitch based roguelites make it somewhat easier to learn and deploy those alternate strategies in my experience because you can read a bit of a clue online, think about it, and then play through a round slowly and thoughtfully. In an action game, you know, you pick up the sickle weapon for the first time and you may have literally seconds of experience with it before you die.

I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.

Re: Solitaire

#64

Post by sdwr »

superultra wrote: post #3

I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time. My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like i…

I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.

It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi

Re: Solitaire

#65

Post by slongfield »

dilDDoS wrote: post #36
mikepurvis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what quarters is that narrative? Surely one only has to play Balatro for an hour or two to understand the incredible game design effort that underpins it all, which is brought so vibrantly to life by the music, art, animations, and all the rest of it. I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.

People that mention this are usually referring to this chunk of the source code: https://www.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/s/KmEWRILR1q My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it t…

People love to dunk on hacky looking gamedev code. Some of it is pretty ugly, e.g, VVVVVV's famous gigantic switch statement, but if it works and makes a fun game, that's the actually important part.

Re: Solitaire

#66

Post by atrus »

aaroninsf wrote: post #47

It's always interesting to drop into these posts, especially when they are at the top of the HN list, and have zero context. Who is this person? What is localthunk? What is "Balatro"? A reminder there are subpopulations online within which are well known and active references. And others, like mine, where have not once come up. I think like podcasts, mobile games are a thing that is just totally invisible to me and .

YouTube is such a great, single-source, area for this. It's wild how many 10m+ subscriber youtube channels that I've never even heard of. So much variety in the world :)

Re: Solitaire

#67

Post by dr-smooth »

skyyler wrote: post #54
aaroninsf wrote: post #47

It's always interesting to drop into these posts, especially when they are at the top of the HN list, and have zero context. Who is this person? What is localthunk? What is "Balatro"? A reminder there are subpopulations online within which are well known and active references. And others, like mine, where have not once come up. I think like podcasts, mobile games are a thing that is just totally invisible to me and .

If you spent as long reading search results for "Balatro" as you did writing this comment, you would have enough context to understand what localthunk and balatro are. I find your musing on the topic interesting, if only as a reminder that people have largely forgotten to help themselves to the free information that surrounds us.

I don't think that was his point. He wasn't asking specifically what Balatro was. He just marvels at the fact that there are so many niche interests out there that their very existence is unknown to him.

Your statement about people having forgotten how to help themselves to information is borderline insulting. A little like sending somebody a "let me google that for you" link.

Or maybe I've misunderstood what you meant.

Re: Solitaire

#68

Post by momojo »

> My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day. I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way.

I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.

I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.

Re: Solitaire

#69

Post by ksynwa »

Trasmatta wrote: post #52
ksynwa wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Miyazaki from FromSoft who said he doesn't play his own games.

No, he said he doesn't play them AFTER they release. But he plays them constantly when they're in development. One of the difficulty rules at FromSoft is that each boss and area has to be beatable by Miyazaki (which he said is a good baseline, because he likes challenge but doesn't consider himself good at games).

I checked and you are right. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Solitaire

#70

Post by ronyeh »

superultra wrote: post #3

I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time. My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like i…

Maybe it’s a comfort game for you. But it’s an addiction for me. I need to stop, so I can find something else to get addicted to.
Post reply on HN