 How do you make a game in a genre that you've never actually played? When hobbyist developer Local Funk sat down to make the popular roguelike card game Bellatro, they had never actually played a roguelike. Even so, Local Funk was obsessed with these kinds of games. They had stumbled across YouTube videos of the roguelike game Luck the Landlord, and they decided, without actually knowing how roguelikes work, that they were going to use this kind of gameplay in their own project. This, they feel, is the key to Bellatro's success. They said, If I'd played Slay the Spire before designing this one, it would have infiltrated the design quite a bit. I didn't want to subconsciously take design elements from those games, and then suddenly mine is less original. Sometimes it's good to do those things. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. But for me, I was making this for myself for fun. I thought it'd be more fun to try myself, not as a retail thing, not, this is the correct thing for the game to sell the best, figuring out design issues is fun for me. Local Funk's decision to stumble blindly into roguelike game design did end up making the development far more complicated. It also led to the creation of one of the most celebrated indie games of 2024 so far. This is the story of how Bellatro got made. Video game development is just a small part of Local Funk's life. The developer prefers anonymity as a way of compartmentalising their game development work. Prior to working on Bellatro, they made several games from scratch, one taking over two years around other projects, but only ever intended them to be for a few key friends. They said, the motivation is that I enjoy game development, actually writing the code, a lot. Making games for my friends is a way to a kind of an end goal. It'd be nice to have something I could show someone, not just a proof of concept for myself that looks like a mess. These are people I've known for a long time, people I think would appreciate and have fun with the projects I've worked on. It's not play testing, doesn't need to be tested, just a thing I made. So what changed with Bellatro? Why release this game to a wider audience when all of Local Funk's other games have been so private and personal? Initially, this was meant to be just another secret project. Local Funk had a lot of annual leave saved up from their job in December of 2021. Rather than travel anywhere, they decided on the perfect holiday. Sitting at home, spending 12 hours a day working on a new game. That was great, Local Funk says. That's my ideal vacation. Years later, something happened that would cause Local Funk to rethink the entire project, and finally release a game to a wider audience. Local Funk's Game Dev Holiday was just the start of a long journey. Initially, the game took inspiration from the Cantonese card game Big 2, which is popular across Southeast Asia. It was intended for online play, and it didn't feature any of the unusual Joker cards that would eventually give Bellatro its unique charm. It was only after discovering, luck be a landlord, that Local Funk really started experimenting with what weird and contradictory cards could be thrown into the game. There were also a few dead ends in the design process. Local Funk spent months working on a card upgrading system that simply wasn't fun, and needed to be scrapped. After 18 months, the game was almost finished, and Local Funk's personal situation changed. They wished to keep the details private, but what they have publicly said is that they needed to move house, and this also meant quitting their job. They had been working in what they call normal development stuff. So while a game like Bellatro was not very similar to their day job, it also did show off the skills they wanted to highlight to prospective future employers. For that reason, with the game nearly finished, Local Funk decided to go through the simple steps of publishing Bellatro on Steam, essentially as a portfolio piece to put on a resume. They published the game, did absolutely no marketing, and then watched, as over the next few months, the game's popularity skyrocketed. Local Funk attributes Bellatro's meteoric rise to YouTube. After around five months on Steam, a few key YouTubers began showing the game off, and at this point, Local Funk began to be flooded with positive feedback. This came as a surprise, and did leave Local Funk feeling a degree of imposter syndrome. In their mind, all of this attention was purely the result of a lucky accident. They said, I put no thought into it. I lucked into it. I don't think I could do that again if I tried. Nevertheless, there was more than luck at play. Bellatro may have started with an accidental good idea, but it took hard work and consistent iteration to polish the game until it became the addictive final product. Said Local Funk. The luck feeling was, the cool thing I started with had enough wiggle room that I could tweak systems within that original idea quite a lot until I found something that worked. The moral of Bellatro then is easy to see. You can't choose your luck in life. Some things will go your way, other times it will feel like you got dealt a bad hand. But if you work hard, you can take advantage of the good luck you're given, and if you're patient, you can begin to stack the deck in your favour.