I dismissed it as too technical for that blog post. I expected this post to be read by a wide variety of people, so I tried to keep technical stuff to a minimum. I did say it's simple and that it's what I'd probably use if I kept going with the project.
While I understand the sentiment of Playstack and LocalThunk to take down these kind of ports, it's a shame for the community because this will only make the game grow more.
It doesn’t sound like they did? The author seems to be proactively not releasing out of respect for LocalThunk, not out of fear. (And certainly not because they’ve already been sent a takedown or anything.)
What legal standing would they even have, if the game were simply named something different from "Balatro"? Game mechanics aren't copyrightable, and the game assets are literally just playing cards...
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.
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.
I also love Balatro, and can say that's shockingly good work especially considering the limitations of the platform. Clearly a labor of love, and I love it.
Readit News
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
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.
https://mattgreer.dev/blog/making-a-shooter-for-the-ereader/
I was fortunate enough to break my Balatro addiction before it had gotten this far along, but others are not so lucky.
https://ko-ko74.itch.io/balatro-for-the-commodore-64-c64
For example, this C64 port was taken down: https://ko-ko74.itch.io/balatro-for-the-commodore-64-c64