"Balatro: Check Raising"
4/10/2025
Since early 2025, I've been obsessed with an indie game called "Balatro". You probably already heard of it, since it won Game of the Year in 2024, and honestly, I can't blame people for being addicted to the game.
On a random night, I had a strange vision that Balatro, with its surreal vibe and hypnotic music, could blend well within the Regretevator universe. As autistic as it sounds, I took it as a challenge to prove so.
I picked up Aseprite, a program I had heard of before but never explored, and began reading through the documentation for both modding Balatro and using Aseprite. Then, I started on the project.
For Balatro, I saw the game as some form of an afterlife where the soul tries its luck to either escape purgatory or get a second chance in life. For Regretevator, I see the game as an eternal limbo, where only death can escape it, since the game uses survival as one of its gameplay loops, it would make sense for me that if you want to keep surviving, despite death, your soul can try its luck through a card game, where sentient joker cards, astrological objects and divine powers assist you to regain back your body into the lobby.
At first, I wanted to use the face of a scrapped character for the Joker sets since I went with the idea that, despite them not being canon anymore, they reincarnated as multi-sentient cards that help you as a form of "avenge me" scenario. Sadly, after communicating with a few people who work in Regretevator, I had to scrap that concept, even tho I still want it to play a role to some extent.
I initially chose Pilby the Caterpillar as the main face of the mod, as their background and lore played a significant role in the cards at first. However, I encountered many roadblocks due to successfully incorporating everything their lore provided into the set, while still having a lot to fill in.
I took a different approach, where the soul uses its recollection of what it had to endure in the elevator, which then transformed into Joker cards, Tarot cards, and Planet cards.
Most of the Joker cards that have the basic Jimbos turned into Pilby, with different color pallets that reference other outfits they wore before, originals, and other references related to the game/community (including the Apple Pilby)
Other Joker cards reference other characters, locations, and items. Similarly, Tarot cards utilize a base that allows the characters to focus more on different characters, as I found on GitHub. I forked it since it hasn't gotten any updates in 9 months by the time I'm writing this, and expanded upon it. Drawing the characters they planned to add, while adding my own creative liberties into the base itself.
The planet cards were the most puzzling for me, so I went with a mixture of items, power-ups, perks, and curses that the player obtains throughout the game and called it "The Item Pack". My only logical explanation for combining curses and power-ups into one collection is that they all have advantages and situational moments in-game.
Lastly, I did the blinds and gave them vague names that relate to the blinds; they're also focused on the characters, as they tend to be the "meat and potatoes" when it comes to in-game lore, Notable examples being "The Claw" for Scag, "The Party" for Poob, "The Sacrifice" for MR, and so on.
Despite my satisfaction with what I've made, I noticed the modpack felt more like a "love letter" to Regretevator and Balatro, rather than merging them into one. While it wasn't my intention to do so, I see how people might not understand my vision and mistake it for a love letter, so to some extent, mission has failed successfully? :P
I wanted to go even further and got in contact with a music composer who had created a few tracks for Regretevator's soundtrack, one of the tracks in game called "Check Raising" sounded like a parody of Balatro, and a mutual of mine suggested me to make that the main music track for the modpack, and after paying a hefty price, they got to work. The results blew my mind at how good the variants sounded.
After creating the promotional materials and showcases for the modpack, I made it public and posted it on modding websites and GitHub for those who want to tweak it to their liking, in case I stop maintaining it.
By the time I'm writing this, I've released the mod yesterday and have reached a total of 151.7 hours in Balatro, investing 115.1 hours in learning Aseprite. It feels great to release something ambitious yet passionate.
I apologize for being slow with maintaining my own website since this and graduating college took a lot of my time, that and my mental health being complex and affecting my motivations a lot, I hope this lengthy blog post suffices my absence :D