7 DEVS Make BALATRO, but it's a HORROR Game!

Seven developers have been challenged to create Bolatro, but with a twist. They must transform it into a horror game. Welcome to Horrified, a series where we turn beloved classics into wicked nightmares. So far, we've horrified chess, Stardw Valley, and now buckle up for the third episode in the series. Each developer is given a specific role such as artist, programmer, or even music composer. So, with that said, let's begin with the first developer. — Hey everyone watching, I'm Three Gnomes. I go by Three Gnomes Games here on YouTube. I'm a solo indie game developer and I make a lot of content here on YouTube for indie game devs to keep them motivated and to help them with their process. The indie game that I'm working on right now is called Too Much Quest. You can see it here on the screen. It's this cute, funny little party based RPG where you can switch between characters at any point and they all have different abilities. And when you go into combat, there's this fun little card-based battler system that makes up the combat side of things. So, if you're into this, you can check out the devlogs on Three Gnomes Games here on YouTube. And without further ado, let's get into this project. So going into this, I was given the concept of Batro as a horror game. And since Batro is so much about the cards and the design of the cards and how you use the cards, I knew that there was a lot of pressure to make sure that the cards really stood out for this game and really emphasized on their own the horror aspect that we're trying to get. So making these cards stand out was my main focus. So the first thing I did was come up with a way to replace the typical suits, diamonds, hearts, spades, clubs with something that would automatically lean more into the horror side of things. So rather than the typical suits, I started coming up with essentially body parts that were I guess theoretically removed from someone. So the first one I'm making here is the tooth. And I didn't have a necessarily like one to one like, oh, the tooth is a diamond. I just started making body parts that would essentially replace the suit. So tooth was first and then the finger which I wanted to make sure like the tooth you could see it had bloody bits. I needed to make sure that the finger looked like it had been severed from a hand. So these aren't just the concept of body parts. These are theoretically real body parts cut from someone. And I felt like that would really help emphasize the horror angle. And then the four suits ended up becoming the tooth, finger, eye, and tongue. So the next thing I did was start trying to redesign how the card would actually look. I didn't want to go with the typical playing card design that most people are used to and that Batro initially uses. I wanted to create a totally new look for the cards for this game. And kind of what I was going for was this mix of typical playing cards and tarot cards to lean into this sort of mystical, dark, almost occult aesthetic. And at this point, I'd already sort of decided that I wanted to go with a demonic theming where demons would sort of be the focal point of some of the higher cards in these sets. So, I spent a lot of time just sort of playing around with the framework and seeing what was going to sort of look best and trying to create this sort of unique look for the cards. And I ended up liking how they turned out. So, now having the frames and the suits, I could start putting together the lower sets of cards, the, you know, the two of eyes, the three of eyes, the four of teeth, things like that, and organizing those. With those set up, the only next thing to do was start setting up the demons themselves that would make up the higher suits of cards. So, personally as an artist, I think that the thing that I do best is cute little creatures and sort of disturbing monsters. So, to be honest, creating these demonic entities sort of allowed me to go back into my typical wheelhouse. So, really what I did was just started coming up with these ideas in my head and then getting into Critter, which is what I use for my art software, and playing around with different designs and shapes until I ended up with a sort of silhouette that I liked. And then taking that silhouette and filling it in and just sort of seeing what colors I could play with to bring these creatures to life. And so the one that I'm showing on screen here is called Legion. And with Legion, I sort of just played with this idea of a bunch of different types of things coming out of this one figure. So there's different types of arms, there's tentacles, and I just sort of followed the same design process to create all of the different demons that I made. And then finally, I just had to sort of take these demons and sort them into what suit I thought fit them best, such as Bowzeub here as my jack. And with all of that set up, I had UI, I had cards, I had demons, I even made the back of the cards. And with that, I felt like I had given whoever gets this project next a really good base in terms of art for creating a horror version of Bellatro. And honestly, working on this and these designs ended up being some of the coolest stuff I think I've ever made. I really love how some of these designs turned out, and I cannot wait to see what all of this is put together into. So, whoever gets this next, I can't wait to see what you do with it. Good luck. And again, thank you, Blackthorn Prod, for allowing me to start off this awesome project. So, a game never can be pure chaos. Even with top-notch devs like the ones we've gathered in this episodes, it is exactly that sort of chaos where bugs run rampants and scripts turn into spaghetti code where today's sponsor, Bezi, would be a lifesaver. Bezi is a Unity specific AI development assistance you connect directly to your project. It reads your hierarchy, your scripts, your sprites

models, sounds, everything really. And most importantly, it understands how it all connects, giving it a full picture of your game. And that's the big difference compared to using something like Chan GBT. With Chbt, you'd have to go back and forth explaining every single script, every connection, basically hand feeding it all the context before it can even start helping you. With Bezi, all of that context is already built in. It just knows your project so you spend less time explaining and more time actually building your game. Bezi can write production ready code, helps find and fix bugs, and even has this agent mode where you can review and apply edits inside Unity without copy pasting. It's kind of like having a real teammate on your project that is always ready to help you out. So, if you're building your own game and need help with the technical side of gamedev or just want to speed up the creation process, then you should definitely check out Bezi using the link in the description. Hey everybody, my name is Chk aka Basic Fun and I run a small YouTube channel covering indie games. I am a musician by trade and I make my own music which is what I did for this project. Shout out to my buddy Ligh Huff Dryen for getting me in contact with Blackthorn Prod. I've never done anything like this before, but I was really excited and it got my brain working in a very interesting way. So, I only had two things to work off of. One is that we were turning Baltletro into a horror game and the second was the incredible art created by Three Gnomes game. Since there was nothing else, I needed some inspiration. So, I did what any normal person would do. I booted up Batro. — One eternity later. — And after that very short session, I figured it was time to start analyzing the music. See, when you look at the track list of the OST, you'll see that Batro's music is essentially variations on a theme. also tried to take inspiration from the inscription soundtrack, but if you look at that track list, it is insane. And I also started looking at Three Gnome's amazing art to see what ideas I could figure out. I paid more attention to the face cards while doing so. And when I got to the Nephilim card, it gave me an idea. What if there was a demon and angel route that you could take when you get cards after each round? Again, I had no idea what the game play was going to be, but I wanted that possibility to be open for the next step. And after some heavy brainstorming, I settled into making five separate tracks. A main theme, a shop theme, a boss theme, an angel theme, and a demon theme. All in the key of A minor in a 98 time signature. So, think of it like a dark waltz. The hardest part was actually figuring out the main theme. This would be the theme that the player would hear the most. So, we needed to be catchy, but not overly complicated. Shop theme was more stripped down to give it that sense of tension and waiting. The boss theme has more movement in the cone with the guitar hits. The angel theme has an extra layer of pads to give it that celestial feel and the demon theme has a low 808 throughout. If we continue to develop the game, I would have loved to go back and refine the music to better fit the final build. Hopefully the next dev can take what I have and use it for whatever way they can. If you want to hear these tracks fully, I will be releasing these on my YouTube channel, Basic Fun, on the same day that this video drops. Be sure to stop by, drop a like, drop a sub. Thank you so much to Blackthorn Prod, for allowing me to be a part of this project. And a big shout out to Three Gnomes and the other devs collaborating on this game. I can't wait to see the final version of how this turns out. Now, really quick note, 80% of our regular viewers have not yet subscribed to the channel. So, if you subscribe and the channel keeps growing, we'll be able to create more of these collaborations and really ramp up the scale. It's a great support. Okay, with that said, let's get cracking. Ah, horror games. It's not just blood and shadows that haunts us. It's the mechanics, the silent builders of dread, the hands that we cannot see, scheming and shaping our fear. Hi, my name is Andrew and I'm the game designer for this challenge. I'm a solo developer working on small fishing bullet hell game and I'm also the co-creator of Tadpool Tales. But today we are here to make Balantro horror. Anyways, firstly I looked at what the artist and the musicians made. These demons look really stylized and I really like the gesture. There's also a UI folder with some gruesome organs, and I'm immediately thinking about sacrifices and hell. The soundtrack makes me think of Hades. Maybe it's the guitar. It's sad and somber, and the heartbeat in the demon track adds suspense. I can definitely work with this. After dissecting Balantro and researching some other horror games, I've came up with something that is close to a dungeon crawler with Balantro mechanics. Think Darkest Dungeon and Balantro having a baby.

The story goes, you play as Mike. He's a nobody. And one day, he made a pact with a devil and became a god at playing poker. He lived like a king and then he died. His death is now due. He begged the devil for one more chance and the devil agreed. — Fine, you may escape if you win at my — But hell is not a table. It's a maze. And there's always something behind you, a reflection of yours, a jester. You cannot kill it. You can only run. And you must outrun the jester and manage your sanity in this dark dungeon escape poker game. From design aspect, I've essentially split the gameplay in two sections. Exploration phase where you dungeon crawl and poker phase where you play solitire. There's a monster AI that should spawn behind you after a few steps, and if he catches you, you die. There's also a sanity meter that you have to keep afloat and if it gets to zero, you also die. You keep it afloat by burning your sanity coins, which you get from winning bids. But here's a twist. Your cards in your deck, your joker cards, which by the way are called blasphemies here, changes and gives intel to your surroundings. So the deck building not only affects your cards as you play to meet your bits, but they also help you while you're exploring. I wrote down some examples and also provided some handmade level logics since I doubt we will have any time for procgen. I've left some handy notes, sorted everything, added the core pillars, mechanics, logics, flowcharts, etc. Anything that I think could be helpful to the team. And that's it. Thank you so much Blackthorn brothers and thighs for inviting me. If you'd like to see a deep dive into the world of horror, check out my latest video on this project. Good luck to the rest of the team and bye-bye.

Hey, what's up? I'm Death or on YouTube MZ_F. ball. He's got F in the title. He probably knows everything about the cryptocurrencies and blockchain. I don't know anything about that. In fact, I really don't even know that much about coding. Instead, mostly what I do is just pixel art. We draw little guys. And look at him. He's hanging out. He's doing stuff. All right. But let's get into it. According to this, I was number five on the list, but it didn't really feel like it because most of what I did was jump into this design dock. For sure, I had a very barebones version of the game I could boot up and check out. But the section I was tasked to work on wasn't really in the game yet. So, to the design dock we go. The section itself was labeled dungeon. And the idea was we have these encounters with enemies, but what's happening in between that, which is a great question. So much of game design is stress and release. What's happening in between these fights? So, I'm digging through this design dock and discovering two things. One, I have never played Bellatro, which I know that's crazy. I'm an idiot. I basically live under a rock. In my defense, though, in my head, Bellatro came out like 3 months ago, not realizing that time just keeps moving, and that was like over a year ago. We'll get to it. It's on the back catalog. But the other more important thing I noticed from this design doc, there's a whole hell of a lot of Darkest Dungeon in here. And that's a game I've played quite a bit, which is good cuz now I understand what we need to do. If you've never played Darkest Dungeon, this part's really simple. We just need a character that's going to move from left to right in a hallway, and this will function as the exploration aspect of the game, tying together the fights and giving the player some form of progression. In the design doc, there's some story stuff. So, we learn that there's a character called Mike. That's cool. That's my name. That's very relatable. And he's like addicted to gambling and his life spiraling. This I love this guy. This guy's great. So, I go in to draw Mike, but I got to keep in mind this whole game is horror. When I'm drawing, I like to find lots of different art for inspiration. So there's just a lot of darkest dungeon up. Any kind of moody pixel art I'm trying to take inspiration from. For me, characters and environments are always going handinand. So while this is happening, I'm also mocking up some kind of like moody reddish sort of hellscape. In my head, I'm thinking since I'm only here to do art, I just want to make sure they have enough assets to finish the game. I start making a checklist of things that were on the design dock that they probably will need. Extra things like these multiple layers for the background and some more essential stuff like these weird rooms or this little mockup of a chest. Since I don't actually use Unity, one final thing I do is put it into the engine that I use, GDAU, just for the purpose of making a mockup. That way, they have some idea of what I was thinking. And with that, my part in Horbalo is actually done. That actually feels really nice cuz I didn't have to code anything. So, yeah, we should do this more often. Hi, my name is OuterCloud and my role is the programmer. And it looks like the first thing I need to do is start working on the darkest dungeon mechanics. That means setting up a little bit of a clickbased player movement and a little dungeon scene for players to walk around in. Right after getting some dungeon traversal down, it's time to actually integrate the Bellacho gameplay that the previous developers worked on. However, the monster encounter is not done yet because there needs to be a little bit of cohesive art between the dungeon and the monster encounter. So, I added a little bit of the dungeon art, uh, specifically like the background into the monster scene and just kind of tied it together a little bit more. There's also a few bug fixes I had to do to the Bellantro gameplay just so that it would actually work with the dungeon system and I could record if you won or lost and then update the dungeon room. But what's a dungeon crawler if you can't find loot? So, the next order of business is adding chests, which you can actually find like the monster items and uh packs and totems from. And so, now you have to actually explore the dungeon to find these items that are going to help you beat the monsters that you also encounter while trying to escape the dungeon. Okay, so this is supposed to be a horror game, and we all know all great horror games have something chasing you. So, it's about time to add a monster. Also, if you lose a round in the Bellatro gameplay, it doesn't outright kill you. It just makes the monster faster. So, if you lose too much Batro, the monster is going to get you. I know that the design document actually calls for more to do with sanity, but in the limited time that we have, I'm going to hope that the next developer can do a little bit more with that. One thing I noticed was it's kind of hard to get the feel of the layout of the dungeon. So, I added a mini map that reveals as you go through the dungeon rooms, so you can actually sort of get an idea of how the dungeon's laid out and where you are in it. And after that is to the final detail is to actually make it so there's an end state. super basic completed game screen when you get to the final room and then also a game over screen which is super basic but good luck to the next developer who will tackle that. I make other games on YouTube so go check that out if you want. And that's all from me. Bye. Hey everyone, I'm Lazy from Lazy Tames, the creators of Amber's Tale, a truly nonlinear Metroid vania that lets you decide the order you unlock abilities and ultimately how you explore the world. We're going to be launching on

Kickstarter. So, if this seems like your cup of tea, please consider following the page. Now, when I got this project, I thought it was so cool. I mean, I had a 28page design document to work with. Lazy was happy. But after playing it for a while, I noticed there wasn't a tremendous amount of variety in the game. And with games like Baltatro and The Darkest Dungeon, variety is what makes things constantly feel fresh. Now, building from that, the art direction set by previous devs was chef's kiss, but there wasn't enough differentiation between the different rooms and where you were. It was very easy to get lost. So, I jumped in a call with a buddy of mine to get some additional art made for the game just to add that variety, only building on top of the theme. The previous artists have set. There were a couple of little adjustments I made, such as color coding the mini map so you can actually see where you were and where you've been, and a few tweaks just to make it a bit more visually clear when you would be going up or down in the map. I decided to put my main focus on the ballet aspect of this game. So adding some quality of life features such as a way to actually see the cards that are in your deck, which helps you with calculating the odds of getting certain hands as you discard cards, for example. While doing all this, I decided to add a tool tip as currently there was no way to actually tell the player what any of their totems did other than a small pop-up when you originally collected it. Lazy doesn't have a good memory, so we needed to add that. Now, one of the core themes in the design document was the fact that you're able to earn these sanity chips. Essentially, a type of currency you can use to spend on buying different cards and other upgrades. Due to time constraints, I had to focus on just the card buying aspect of that. So, I made a few shaders and a card upgrade system. Now, you could randomly encounter a merchant in special rooms that would allow you to spend this currency you have earned by defeating monsters to buy upgraded cards. And since the monster scaling was really quite intense, it made the exploration aspect of this game really important. You had to explore to find additional totems and merchants to upgrade your capabilities. It added this riskreward of entering a room and thinking, am I able to beat this monster or should I turn around and explore another room first? Now, we've got some additional cards, but we also needed some variety in the monsters. So Logan got to work actually making pixel art versions of all of the different monsters, and I programmed custom abilities for each monster. This gave each monster a unique feel to it. Some monsters you would not be able to use queen cards on, and others would make it such that you have a lot of discards, but you've only got one playable hand, so you really have to make it count. And in the end, we ended up making this many different monsters and this many new totems. At this point, I had received the remaining art from Logan, so we were able to really set dress the different rooms, give them a unique-l lookinging feel. The existing art was used for the hallways and the special merchant rooms. And then we added this new unique looking room for the actual dungeons where you would fight the monsters. You're fighting these demons. Makes sense they've got a cool looking layer. And with just one more day left, I decided to make some final tweaks. making things like a blurred background, creating a sound manager to make the sound effects and music play. Also, a shout out to whoever made this music. Having the different soundtracks be similar enough that you can just fade and transition between them in different situations, creating essentially one seamless soundtrack was awesome to set up. I added a shader to the monsters and different buttons, just making the scene a little bit more lively. Fixed a few last minute bugs and the game built first try. But with that, I've been lazy. And don't forget to follow Amber's Tail on Kickstarter. Thanks for having me. — Yo, looks nice. — Uh, going into this, I sort of expected it to be like Baltatro where you go into it and it's sort of just straight into the card game. I really was not expecting any sort of elegant world building like this and it fits so well with the horror game aesthetic. It is really cool to hear your own music in a game. This is actually the first time I've ever heard my music in a video game. So, this is awesome. Yeah, it's really just kind of oppressively dark and ominous, but somehow still very charming due to the pixel art style. I really think this is incredible. — While I was making the talk, I just kept thinking like, "Oh my god, I think the developers of are going to hate me in what I'm going to write here. I don't know if it's going to be good. I can't tell whether it's too much, too little the feature. Is it actually going to be good? " So, it was quite a scary experience. — Oh, got our first enemy. Here we go. Okay. Minus two max hands, plus five max discards. All right, so I have eight discards, but I can only play one hand. All right. Oh, let's do a straight. Let's do that. Okay, there we go. Straight. That'll hit me at 100. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, there we go. Won that one. Damn, this is They're new monsters. I've never seen these monsters

before. They're so cool. Yeah, these are like pretty generic, I guess, buffs that you get. Um, I was hoping to see some more like crazier buffs that are related to the traversal, but probably it's a lot harder to make. — I really like the fact that you had like multiple tracks that were all kind of the same vibe, but different in different ways. So, being able to actually just merge them into each other seamlessly as you went into like different scenes and stuff was like so cool. It had some of the different tracks when you when you're facing one of the demons or something, it was just more of a hype version of the same soundtrack and it was like ah, it just really added to it. It was really good. — Oh, I won. Yeah, there we go. Nailed it. More sanity cards. I do like that. Yeah, the keys come in when you win. I like that. The music didn't stand out when I first started playing. And typically, I feel like you see that a lot if the music is bad where uh you notice it right away. And if it's good, it just kind of adds to the atmosphere and you feel it later. You notice it. — Chip micro, do you have any ideas on what you would do if you had to make this a commercial release? you know, just something to connect the Batro and the exploration together a bit more. It's great finding upgrades for your the actual Botro matches, but I think those two elements of the game could be just solidified a little more. Oh, that's so cool. So, the the card effects actually sort of tie into like the lore of the demons. I'm guessing it really feels like they have like they're correlated because Lilith is typically known as like the queen of demons. So, the fact that queens grant zero points kind of emphasizes her role as like the queen of demons. That's really good design. — Oh, Legion minus one max hands. Okay, got it. I love how each monster has a different effect. I love that it was a tricky part to juggle because Balantro makes you feel super overpowered while you're playing. You feel this crazy amount of numbers growing. You feel powerful. And with horror games, it's all about like scarcity. It's all about the uncertainty. I think that's the part that's like really tricky. Hello. Yo, I was saying that I didn't think they would have this, but they added in. — That's rad. That's Bezabub. Oh, he looks so cool in this world. They really nailed it with this pixel style of adjusting the original art that I made to this world design. I can't get over how cool they look. — I think the darkest dungeon comparison was the closest thing. It's scary cuz you could die anytime, but it's also just kind of moody. And I think moody is the right angle you can go to when you want to play a game that's playable over and over again. You don't necessarily want to feel like you're going to get jump scared, but you're going to feel like I'm a little tense. I think that game does a good job. So, I think leaning in that direction is the right call. — 10 jack, queen, king, ace. That's another straight. I can get that. Okay, that might do some damage. Let's see. No whammy. No way. Oh, that's good. Solid. Yeah, we win. Let's go. Chitco plus 50 points every hand. Okay. I got like after getting my first like new cards, I was like, "Oh, wait. This is powerful. " And then the numbers ramped up and I was like, "Wait, I might not win this. " and then I somehow won it and then next round I got really lucky and somehow won that. I think that expanding more into like making you feel like you're just barely winning or like fighting for your life to win each battle could definitely expand on the tension and horror part of it. — I really enjoy the work that is put in this game. Again, I'm just so floored as to how much I'm hearing my own music in a video game. That's so cool. Yeah, just seeing how I started this out with the demons and the cards and what they were able to go on to do with it was really phenomenal and impressive and I'm really impressed with what they did with just my cards and the concept of Baltatro horror game. Thanks so much for watching guys. Let us know which title you would like to see horrified next. And remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss future gamedev collaborations like this one. Cheers.