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Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

mattgreer.dev

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Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#21

Post by duneisagoodbook »

Dwedit wrote: post #8

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.

Absolutely! I think that's what the author meant when he said "In my prototype, your hand at the bottom of the screen is a background (similarly, in my E-Reader solitaire game, all of the cards are drawn into a background instead of using sprites)."

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#22

Post by rkuykendall-com »

anyfoo wrote: post #19

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…

It sounds like this is just a relic of you beating the well-designed tutorial? Once you start advancing through the decks and difficulties, as well as unlocking more vouchers and jokers, it becomes quite complex. I have many, many hours in it and I can't even beat ante 8 on White Stake consistently. But streamers can consistently beat Gold Stake, as well as playing PvP, so it's clearly not a cookie clicker.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#24

Post by city41 »

duneisagoodbook wrote: post #21
Dwedit wrote: post #8

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.

Absolutely! I think that's what the author meant when he said "In my prototype, your hand at the bottom of the screen is a background (similarly, in my E-Reader solitaire game, all of the cards are drawn into a background instead of using sprites)."

Thanks for the clarification (I'm the blog author). If one were to really make this game, how the cards would ultimately be rendered is hard to say. Sprites are nice because you can overlay them and form many card variations from just a few sprites. Tiles rendering into a background doesn't account for transparent pixels, so building up tiles into a single background is not possible.

One way to handle that is to provide all the possible tile variations, but that would take up so much space. So you'd have a set of tiles for a regular Ace of Spades, and an entirely different group of tiles for a Lucky Ace of Spades for example.

The GBA has 4 backgrounds, so it would be doable to grab three of them and use them to render cards. That would only leave 1 background left for, well, the background :)

Another option would be to use a memory buffer and implement tile rendering yourself that accounts for transparent pixels. That would be the best of backgrounds and sprites combined into one. That would solve many problems, at the cost of the implementation would probably take up a lot of space. My hunch is this would be the best approach.

This right here might be why I find this platform so interesting. It's very limited, and the limitations usually bump into each other and you often steel from Peter to pay Paul.

Oh and the post didn't mention debuffed cards (they have a red X drawn over them). That'd be yet another card layer to throw into this mix.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#26

Post by anyfoo »

rkuykendall-com wrote: post #22
anyfoo wrote: post #19

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…

It sounds like this is just a relic of you beating the well-designed tutorial? Once you start advancing through the decks and difficulties, as well as unlocking more vouchers and jokers, it becomes quite complex. I have many, many hours in it and I can't even beat ante 8 on White Stake consistently. But streamers can consistently beat Gold Stake, as well as playing PvP, so it's clearly not a cookie clicker.

That’s not the reason I don’t like it.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#27

Post by city41 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #25

I’m not sure 32 vs. 64 bit even matters for scoring. Doesn’t balatro go well above the uint64 max, meaning it’s surely using some Numeric abstraction type?

It is written in Lua and the source code is available (just extract it from the PC version). It's using Lua's number type for all numbers, which is a double precision float.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#28

Post by Eavolution »

Waterluvian wrote: post #25

I’m not sure 32 vs. 64 bit even matters for scoring. Doesn’t balatro go well above the uint64 max, meaning it’s surely using some Numeric abstraction type?

Balatro uses 64 bit floats for numbers. This does matter as the game effectively has a hard ending at NaN when you overflow the floating point max. This will occur at a significantly lower value if you switched to 32 bit floats, therefore making the highest possible ante lower.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#29

Post by Waterluvian »

Eavolution wrote: post #28
Waterluvian wrote: post #25

I’m not sure 32 vs. 64 bit even matters for scoring. Doesn’t balatro go well above the uint64 max, meaning it’s surely using some Numeric abstraction type?

Balatro uses 64 bit floats for numbers. This does matter as the game effectively has a hard ending at NaN when you overflow the floating point max. This will occur at a significantly lower value if you switched to 32 bit floats, therefore making the highest possible ante lower.

Yeah makes sense. I thought it would be integers and therefore signifies it uses a whole numeric type abstraction that would support basically infinite sized integers.

Re: Balatro for the Nintendo E-Reader

#30

Post by LoganDark »

sram1337 wrote: post #4

re: numbers, you could store them as integers, but just encoded as 10 times their value. So 1.5 becomes 15. 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

> re: numbers, you could store them as integers, but just encoded as 10 times their value. So 1.5 becomes 15.

I find it really weird that they dismissed fixed point as being too technical because it's actually really simple, it's basically just this.

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