First patch of the demo and this time around we focussed on some graphical overhauls but also added 2 new tiles (Hightail and Lame Duck) that open up for new playstyles because they allow you to shoo birds into the discard pile or back into the draw pile respectively. We hope you like the new open skies and more than anything the new music by our fantastic composer Emil Smith[www.emilsmithmusic.dk].

Oh and we have a first version of a new intro!

We've also fixed all bugs that came in in the first week of the demo and now our backlog is quite short. Next week and this one, we focus on level 4 art, music and sound mixing, animations and the Way of Water. Details about our future release schedule is in our Development Roadmap that we posted earlier today.

Enjoy the flight!

Martin

Gameplay changes:

• Play button shows sum of attack and suit

• Added Hightail and Lame Duck tiles for shooing opponents into piles

• Pump-A-Rum now creates permanent tiles

• Tiles created by Pump-A-Rum are now of better quality

• When you get the daily run modifier with Pump-A-Rum you start with a Snipe tile and it only lasts 5 turns

• We got our new music in!

• There’s also a first draft of the new intro – still got to work on it a bit more but it’s nicer than the old one

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug in reward distribution between way tiles and common tiles

• Show hint about discarding during tutorial

• “Skip” was not a clear enough word in the tile picker. Now it’s more explicit what not picking any tile means.

• Tiles in tile picker are larger

• Stop dulling the follower colour when they are not clickable.

• Hone destroys tiles created by Pump-A-Rum now

• Balatro doesn’t crash the game anymore if there are not enough tiles in the discard pile

Known issues

• There is still be issues when connectivity is bad (i.e. crash during run upload, Steam trouble)

• Hightail and Lame Duck lack animations

• Game “pauses” when a tile with value >10 gets created

Now that our demo has been out for two weeks it's time to lay out how we will go about openly developing this game.

There are three versions of the game that we will be working with: the main game, the demo, and the playtest builds. The main game will be launched later this year and the launch version will at least contain 3 ways, daily runs and a progression mode. The demo is actually also split in two versions: beta and public.

Here is what will be released to whom and when:

Playtest Builds will be used to sporadically test big changes. They run completely independent from other versions using their own daily run seeds, leaderboards, and save folders. Only our existing playtesters have access to this version but we will accept new signups at some point in the future. Join our Discord to learn about that.

Demos (beta) is where the next demo build goes before being published. This build is the bleeding edge and has more features as well as bugs than any other build. We use it to test changes with a smaller group of players before publishing the build wider. Visit our Discord server if you want to have access to the beta branch.

Demos (public) are the default demo and will always be a showcase of the start of the game. We intend to update the demo every two weeks, adding new tiles, ways, buffs, enemies, graphics, music, and animations. The demo will be changed significantly once the main game launches.

The Main Game is going to be made accessible at launch. We will send previews out to content producers, curators, playtesters, journalists, and friends before the launch.

The update strategy for the finished game will be the topic of a future post. Still a few months to go.

In Part II of this post I will describe the roadmap for the game, what features we have planned and when they will be rolled out.