#jmibo's various custom jokers

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

hot karma
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thought i'd try this out. this is my first time doing any modding so it's going to be a little all over the place, but this'll be an extremely vanilla-compatible mod -- no new consumables, enhancements, editions, suits, etc., and relatively few new mechanics. if this ends up as a finished product, it'll probably have around 15 jokers, but more likely i'll just stop making things when i get bored. only really making a thread so i don't clog up the dev channel w/ game design questions etc.

i'm more interested in the game design side of things so everything's just going to be placeholder text for a while

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tsubamegaeshi: scored cards count as cards in hand and vice versa when scoring

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^ this is one of the two-ish aforementioned New Mechanics

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the second one is this:

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(edition cards in consumable area trigger after everything else, similar to observatory)

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(using a foil planet doesn't upgrade the hand by 50 extra chips)

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this one's something i could probably get rid of ... while i think it's interesting that you have to choose what to keep and what to use, how much of your consumable area to dedicate to good editions, etc., maybe it's not interesting enough to warrant a new mechanic (even if that new mechanic is something that already existed in the game without me having to program anything)

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i did want to try making more jokers involving editions, though

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e.g. this one

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chooses randomly every round: 50% chance of foil, 35% chance of holographic, 7.5% chance of polychrome, 7.5% chance of negative (the usual weights)

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there's the option of holding it for half the game to wait for negative, but then you don't have much time to actually fill the two open slots (slot opened by making something negative + slot opened by selling this)

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there was also this one but i'll definitely have to rework it because it seems extremely overpowered as it stands

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if you got 8 random negative jokers from anaglyph deck then you could buy things you actually want and make them negative

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the phrasing is silly but i think this one could be interesting

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(essentially you get 5 free hands that roll over between rounds -- so if you used 2 hands in the first round you had this, it'd give 3 hands on the next round)

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can be used to

  • prevent death
  • gain money
  • spend more time scaling
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guaranteed to either give $5-$15 or save your life

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(or you could die despite having like 9 hands)

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since it triggers whne blind is selected, you can also blueprint/brainstorm it for tons of hands and money

coral reef
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i was making a spreadsheet to organize my ideas and i noticed that literally everything i wrote down counts as an "effect joker". whoops

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well it's not entirely unintentional -- i wanted to have relatively few scoring types of things because in my opinion the set of scoring jokers that already exist in balatro is pretty good!! felt like most of the things that i could add would mostly add bloat

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current joker ideas that affect scoring:

  • tsubamegaeshi (the "swap played & held cards" one)
  • trigger edition effects 1 additional time when card is scored (this wouldn't be a "retrigger" so if you had this and a red seal polychrome card it would trigger x1.5 not three but four (2x2) times)
  • X5 mult, make all jokers perishable when next Blind is selected ("next Blind" as in the effect only triggers once) -- this one feels a little bit contrived & bad so i'll probably not add this one even if "save your run for 5 rounds and then die if you can't find any good jokers" is a funny idea to me
  • if played hand does not meet blind requirements, reset chips to 0 and gain X0.5 mult (resets at end of round) -- a little weird but would help with things like dusk, acrobat, card sharp, loyalty card (and would just be good in general w/ burglar
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somewhat-assorted selection of effect joker ideas:

  • unlimited consumable slots (probably this would actually mean "+100" or something), destroy all consumables when entering shop
  • make all consumables negative at end of shop; consumable slots fixed at 1 -- extremely broken in many different ways, but aside from being broken i feel like there are interesting interactions here. like you could save copies of the suit tarots or terrible planets so that you don't have to see them again, and if you use like no consumables then by the end of the run you can only get deaths and hanged men and hermits and temperances forever (or if you collect all 22 then you can choose exactly which tarot to get at any given time, like perkeo but more fiddly)
  • ignore slot limits on effects that create jokers / consumables (niche as hell)
hot karma
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i think this mechanic might suck

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currently the "edition retriggers" are separate from normal retriggers, so if you have, say, one "placeholder 8" and one hanging chad & you play a polychrome card, you get:

  • x1.5 mult from polychrome
    • x1.5 mult again from placeholder 8
  • retrigger from hanging chad
    • x1.5 mult from polychrome
      • x1.5 mult again from placeholder 8
  • retrigger from hanging chad
    • x1.5 mult from polychrome
      • x1.5 mult again from placeholder 8
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total of 2x3 = 6 instances of x1.5 mult

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a little bit too powerful!!

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essentially the # of times the edition triggers on each card is (# of "edition retriggers" + 1) * (# of retriggers + 1)

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in this exaggerated example, a single polychrome 2-5 card would give x1.5 mult 81 times (x1e14)

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all of this isn't helped by the fact that i have this as a common because i figured "it'll just be like +50 chips +10 mult in most cases"

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actually with this setup there were just a bunch of "again!"s at the end for no reason

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i mean to be fair baron+mime does let you scale in three directions without being limited to 5 cards (# of barons, # of mimes, # of cards in hand)

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  • it's not that easy to set up a retrigger build with this. "not that easy" as in "you have to get a single aura card" but still!!
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well i'll have to playtest it without using debugplus to create 20 polychrome copies of it...

hazy tulip
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so currently if you have a polychrome card, a placeholder 8, and a retrigger joker, the text that pops up is as follows:

card: X1.5 Mult
placeholder 8: Again!
card: X1.5 Mult
retrigger joker: Again!
card: X1.5 Mult
placeholder 8: Again!
card: X1.5 Mult

(then followed by a bunch of extraneous Again!s because i'm terrible at coding)

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but what i could have it do instead is this:

card: X1.5 Mult
placeholder 8: X1.5 Mult
retrigger joker: Again!
card: X1.5 Mult
placeholder 8: X1.5 Mult

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which would mean that there aren't two layers of "Again!"s

hot karma
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effect idea (probably not that good design-wise): "all contained poker hands add to base chips and mult"
so with everything at base level, a two pair would give you 20 (2pair) + 10 (pair) + 5 (high card) chips and 2+2+1 mult

or 8-8-8-5-2 of hearts would give flush + 3oak + pair + high card (base 80 chips 10 mult)

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the idea is that it could make it easier to pivot to a higher-level hand & more possible planets could benefit your hand

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obvious problems:

  • hard to program: would almost definitely require lovely -> reduces compatibility with other mods
  • new-ish mechanic: not too far off from everything else in the game but still i want to keep things fairly close to vanilla
  • hard to communicate: i think the description isn't that bad and players already know about "contained poker hands", but ui-wise it seems a little weird. specifically what do i want to show in the base score preview? total base chips+mult? should i display all of the contained poker hands, or just the nominal one since that still matters for todo list, satellite, etc.?
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the other obvious concern is balance...haven't playtested it yet but i would guess that this is a similar effect to x2.25~x3 mult (if the base chips and mult are each increased by a factor of around 1.5 on average) + faster planet scaling
i.e. real good

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flush five would be

  • flush five: 160 chips x 16 mult
  • 5oak: 120 chips x 12 mult
  • 4oak: 60 chips x 7 mult
  • flush: 35 chips x 4 mult
  • 3oak: 30 chips x 3 mult
  • pair: 10 chips x 2 mult
  • high card: 5 chips x 1 mult
    total = 420 chips x 45 mult = 18900 points without any extra chips/mult (regular flush five is base 2560 points so this is a 7.38x base increase)
hot karma
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horribly unbalanced joker idea

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i was going to have the copies be destroyed at the end of the round rather than being rental but i figured i would try this version out first

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seems kind of broken if you have the econ required to keep 7 different rentals ....

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haven't played on gold stake so i don't know how big of a deal rental is unfortunately

hazy tulip
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perfect

hot karma
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Pinwheel
Sell this card to add [edition] to a random Joker, edition changes every round

can be any of foil, holo, polychrome, negative; probably also includes modded editions but idk if i want to keep that. editions are weighted as usual, so negative is a 7.5% chance every round, which isn't very good

pinwheel.png
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wow small

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i think if i wanted it to suck a little less i could make it so that it never does the same edition twice in a row

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which would mean that if it chose foil last there'd be a 15% chance to get negative next instead

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and if it chose holo last there'd be an 11% chance

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not too confident about the theming here ... i figured pinwheel (as in the wait cursor on macos) works because

  • wheel
  • you have to wait an indeterminate amount of time in order for it to be any good
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