@Azurakumo@mrpablington Really enjoying it. It's a bit repetitive but honestly, that's not a bad thing. I have not played the older ones (I only really got into gaming the last 5 or so years).
Lately I’ve been really hooked on #balatro.
I found out it uses the #löve2d engine, and I remembered something about Löve games being unintentionally cross platform.
You know, given how well #Balatro is doing, I'd wager that a #RogueLite version of #Scrabble where you attack enemies by spelling out incantations could be popular.
Mechanically, you could probably design a better game with quarto pieces or arbitrary symbols but I think being able to sell it as "Roguelike Scrabble" and creating that avenue for domain knowledge transfer are too big to pass up.
Mildly hot programming take.
People who bashed Balatro's "massive scroll of ifs" are ignoring the facts that:
Game dev is fundamentally different from modern GUI/web dev.
Developing a single-player game solo is very different even from developing a big game with a team and a lifecycle, not to mention a continually-delivered web project.
I've just realised it's been about a week since I sold my Xbox Series X and I can't say I've missed it all that much.
My Steam Deck OLED has done a better job of keeping me entertained, having a bigger library, and the games being generally cheaper. Sure, the games aren't like 4K ULTRA MEGA HD or whatever, but it's fine - I can easily cope with playing Balatro for the rest of my life.
Somebody shared the source code for parts of #Balatro. It's a great game and the devs don't deserve to have it stolen so that's not cool.
On the other hand. Do you remember those memes about if/else blocks to assign a number to a string of that number? That's literally how their code works.
Just goes to show, you don't need to be an excellent programmer to program an excellent game.