Finally, the ultimate weapon against boredom while waiting
There is a project to convert the Steam app to a side-loadable mobile app (both for Android and iOS): https://github.com/blake502/balatro-mobile-maker
I haven’t tested that out myself and I have no idea how it compares to their official mobile release, but I’m super curious about how it was implemented (it’s the first time I saw a tool that could convert a game to an iOS app), so I’ll be looking into it at some point.
Balatro Mobile Maker works because the game’s engine (LOVE 2D) is designed from the ground up to be multiplatform. It’s trivial to “port” compared to other engines.
That makes sense, and that engine and some of the other games they feature look interesting.
Does that mean that Balatro (and presumably other LOVE 2D games) is packaged like Doom with its WAD files, where there’s an engine (a generic LOVE 2D one) that runs the game, interpreting the Lua game code, which is basically just packaged like an asset? Or is there a Balatro engine that needed to be built for each platform? I saw that BMM downloads a base IPA and an APK patcher, so I’m assuming it’s closer to the latter, but I could see it going either way.