O'BLOCK dev borrows Balatro's UI feel, not its visuals, after one player's bug list

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The developer of O'BLOCK, a free Steam sneaker-reseller game, rebuilt the interface overnight after a tester listed usability problems. The list covered a scroll wheel that moved the selection, a card drawn beneath text, a hard-to-read price bar, and a custom sneaker price stuck at 1.1k. The team's guiding rule was to copy interaction behavior from Balatro, such as hover and press responses, while keeping every on-screen object drawn from the game's own world. Across five builds shipped in one night, the street screen grew from 8 to 27 visible shoeboxes, and the update touched 18 source files. The developer published a before-and-after dataset alongside the Build 18 patch notes.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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