A Jolly Expansion

A Jolly Wangcore themed joker mod for Balatro

This is a small project that I felt like making after playing a bit of Balatro. It features 9 new jokers (and one seal) all themed around the YouTuber and Twitch Streamer, Jolly Wangcore, who I have personally been a fan of for some time. I thought "Hey, I've been watching this guy play mods for years. I can make a mod. Why haven't I made a mod for him". Then I remembered he said he didn't like when people made mods for him a few years back so I made it for myself instead.

I have done a couple of testing runs for this and consider these jokers to be pretty balanced alongside the rest of the ones found in the vanilla game. Being only 9 jokers, it won't change your game entirely, but perhaps another Jolly Wangcore fan might enjoy seeing the references within.

Version 1.0: Direct Download

How to Install:

To install the mod, you first need to download and install the latest versions of Lovely Injector and SMODS by following the instructions on Github. Then put the "A Jolly Expansion" folder extracted from the zip file into your "Mods" folder.

Notes on Development:

Unlike the last mod I made, this was pretty small. Balatro is a very easy game to mod for, even without much experience in Lua. In fact, you can easily just copy the code from within the game, tweak it a bit using the documentation within the SMOD wiki, do a bit of art, then you pretty much have you're own original joker! If it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to create individualistic art for each joker, I could have had this mod complete within a week. Alas, I completed this mod in about 3 months.

It didn't nessacarily take 3 months because I was doing a project that saw artwork being a big component. The real reason was because I was trying to add effects to the cards that weren't like the ones in the original game. For example, for a while I was trying to get an effect working on the squirrel seal where the card would be put back into your deck so would have a chance to draw it again. Through attempting this I was coming accross so many errors both graphical and simply confusing from a debugging perspective. I think I spent a week on that; too much for a single effect within project I was simply going to be making for myself and a few people. I attempted to alter it where it would return to your hand but not become a part of your deck, but all I tried had the card be added to your deck aswell so I left it at that.

Coming back to the artwork I had to do for each card and the seal, I found a way to be lazy. There was a time where I would jump at the chance to put mountains of effort into a project like this, but for me I hadn't touched a drawing tablet in almost 10 years. Instead, I would use artwork from the vanilla game and some images I found online. If you look not so carefully, the background for "funny penis ship" is actually the card "spaceship" (which also happens to be "nebula" with a space ship on it). I've played it safe for other cards too but its kind of hard to explain it in simple terms. I was using Aesprite and it had a lot of tools where I could make it look like I'd done a lot of work but it also helped me to do less work. However, you can probably still see in "trashquach" and the federation ship I had to attempt a bit of pixel art to get things right.

As a whole, I thought this project went pretty well. As I learnt more from the Balatro modding there were some pretty crazy things I was getting ideas for but like I said with the squirrel seal, it was probably better to leave them behind just to finish the project. The only real downside to this project was that it was taking too long. I had another project on the back burner that was going really well and I was stopping all work on it for this and as much as I enjoyed making this, it was never going to be a strong portfolio peice. I think in the long run it would have maybe been a better idea to enlist the help of someone else, even if they weren't going to go to the limits that I myself was going to go to to make the artwork stand out. I'm not sure if that's going to be something to reasonably consider for other personal projects but its something to note in case it is.