"I was in super crunch mode": Balatro creator opens up on the toll the stress of indie development took on his "physical and mental health"

Balatro creator LocalThunk has remained pretty private in the wake of the poker roguelike's massive launch, choosing not to reveal his real name or even appear in person to accept the Best Independent Game award at The Game Awards last year. Nonetheless, in a new blog post running down the history of Balatro's development, LocalThunk has opened up on some of the health issues caused by the stress of game's development.

The development of Balatro began in December 2021 as a hobby project for LocalThunk, who was working in IT at the time. By January 2022, LocalThunk writes that he was "now fully immersed and obsessed. This is my favourite feeling in the world. When I was back in University I would routinely stay up until the wee hours of the morning working on my weird game projects and greet my parents while they made their morning coffee. I got back into this groove and starting in January I was hooked."

LocalThunk took a break from the project for a few months between March and May 2022 to maintain his enthusiasm, and early after returning to development he started to consider a Steam version of the game. In April 2023, he launched the game's Steam page, and after some public playtests and interest from YouTubers he says June 2023 was "about the time when Balatro stopped being a pure hobby for me."

It was also in June 2023 – just before LocalThunk originally planned to launch the game – that publisher Playstack got in contact. As the game's momentum continued to grow, he spoke with several different publishers and hired a lawyer to assist with the contract negotiations.

By August 2023, LocalThunk had signed a deal with Playstack and was continuing to see the demo get more and more attention. "This is when my sleep and heart started having issues," he says. "I have talked about this a tiny bit in the past, but I really struggled with my physical and mental health from this time onward all the way up to launch. This was entirely because of the stress around dealing with the public, players, and the pressure to get everything done before February 2024."

LocalThunk says his sleep and heart issues kept "getting worse," and he'd often need to "sleep sitting upright on the couch because sleeping while lying down kept getting interrupted by my heart." Yet between all the business and other development obligations growing around Balatro's development, he felt that he couldn't spare the time to see a doctor.

That changed in January 2024. "One night I am watching the movie The Abyss with my partner and suddenly I get tunnel vision, my heart is absolutely pounding and I feel like something is seriously wrong," LocalThunk writes. "I sit on the couch for a while, totally freaked out. I’m really scared. I call my doctor and see him the next morning for an appointment."

The doctor explained that this wasn't "wasn’t a heart attack or heart failure but an anxiety attack. I am not normally an anxious person and have never had issues with this in the past but I think the intense stress for such a long time has done quite a bit of damage. He asks me if my work has been stressful lately. I don’t even know how to explain."

LocalThunk says an invitational tournament shortly after this incident was "probably my favourite moment" of the period leading up to Balatro's launch, so it wasn't entirely a death march in those final weeks, but he "was in super crunch mode" even in February 2024 as the game was readying for launch.

Crunch has historically been a massive issue in the game industry, but we tend to think of it as a problem primarily associated with big studios. Naughty Dog has done crunch. FromSoftware has done crunch. Larian has done crunch. Do indies do crunch? LocalThunk is certainly presenting himself as an example here. While we often think of crunch as the result of bad management, passionate creators are more than capable of piling the stress on themselves.

Of course, the story of Balatro has a happy ending, since the game launched to absolutely glowing reviews and life-changing day one sales. After seeing the shock of the day one sales, LocalThunk says that the "other moment from that day that sticks out is later that day when my partner got home from work. She had been following along all day and struggling to get any work done, and when she got home she gave me a great big hug. I wasn’t sure I’d even survive the launch but here we were. I could not have done this without her. We ordered burgers for supper and popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate."

Fallout: New Vegas director and CRPG veteran Josh Sawyer says burnout has "replaced crunch as the primary hazard of the game industry."