1st July 2024
Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - Debut Developer Blog
Hi Talisman fans!
Recently, you might remember that we officially announced Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, which you can wishlist now over on Steam!
As we’ve been working away in secret on the game over the last few months, we’ve got lots of exciting features, behind-the-scenes updates and looks at how the game has been coming along so far to show you, here in our first developer blog! Please keep in mind that we’re still a long way from release, so everything you see in this dev blog is still in the early stages of development and is subject to change.
Also, there’s some stuff we’ve been working on that isn’t mentioned in this blog (like the updated user interface and all the 5th Edition specific rules we’ve been integrating). That’s because we’re saving talking about them until a future developer blog, where we can go into way more detail! Rather than gloss over all the cool things we’re doing, we want to make sure you get a proper look at what development of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is shaping up to be. So expect to see much more of these developer blogs between now and release, and make sure you follow us everywhere so that you don’t miss any!
So without further ado, let’s start showing off what we’ve been working on for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!
Stripping Back the Talisman: Digital Edition Engine
The game engine we use to make Talisman: Digital Edition was originally adapted from a proprietary engine, and we’ve worked with it for over 11 years now. So when we knew we were making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we had two options. We could either:
Start fresh with an entirely new engine (like Unreal/Unity).
Use the same engine we’d developed and used for Talisman: Digital Edition.
After a lot of internal discussions and testing of what we could achieve with the current Talisman: Digital Edition engine, we decided that the best plan would be to use the same engine. But after 11 years of build built upon, updated and edited, the engine for Talisman: Digital Edition has accrued quite a lot of tech debt.
To use an analogy to explain what that ‘tech debt’ is: Imagine you’ve got a house that you’ve lived in for 11 years - you’ve made yourself really comfortable in there, you’ve got used to all the quirks of living there, and you know which floorboards you shouldn’t put weight on, and which ones you can. Over the years, you’ve had to patch up the walls, put tape over some pipes to stop leaks - and if you turn off the light upstairs, the fridge stops working (but nobody has a clue why). That’s where we’re at with Talisman: Digital Edition.
Now, when making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we looked at our old house and realised that if we stripped it down to its foundations, we’d have a really solid framework to build back up from. And so, our team got to work on ripping up the floorboards, pulling out the busted pipes and removing both the light upstairs and the fridge - from a programming point of view. It took us a good while, but eventually we were left with an extremely basic version of Talisman: Digital Edition, where everything worked smoothly specifically because there was only the framework left - when you’ve knocked down the walls, it’s hard for bugs to hide behind them!
One of the basic things we kept in was the game setup screen - looks shinier now though!
And since then, we’ve been able to use the framework we’ve been working with for the last 11 years to build up Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - only this time, we’ve been able to use all our experience and hindsight to know where and how we should build back better.
An early look at the Digital 5th Edition game board, using the framework of Digital Classic Edition as a basis for the layout.
We appreciate that our house analogy has been doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but we hope that explains why we’re using the Talisman: Digital Edition engine for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!
We know that a lot of you would ask why we’ve not used an entirely new engine, and we want to be as transparent as we can when we explain why - and we don’t want you to think it was an easy decision to make! At one point, we even got as far as making a demo in Unreal Engine to fully explore what would be the best options for you as players, alongside us as developers.
Adventure Cards like the Magic Portal work similarly in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition as they did in Talisman: Classic Edition.
Visual Improvements
For anyone who’s taken even a quick look at Talisman: 5th Edition, one of the things that strikes you immediately is the fresh, modern look of the game. Games Workshop and Avalon Hill have done an amazing job of bringing a fresh new style to Talisman, while keeping the iconic, fantasy look that we’ve all come to expect over the last 40 years.
Our art team know how to make sense of all these menus - the rest of us, not so much!
Of course, we wanted to make sure that style was matched in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, so our art team have been hard at work over the past year on making sure that Talisman: Digital 5th Edition looks as good as it possibly can. We might be biased, but we think they’ve done a great job!
Check out our fully 3D, coloured-in character models in action!
Ever wanted to know what the top of the Dwarf’s head looks like? You’re welcome.
We’ve still got more work to do on making the board, characters and the entire experience feel much more ‘polished’ than Talisman: Digital Classic Edition’, but we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made so far.
Adding All the New Cards
If you’ve already taken a look at a physical copy of Talisman: 5th Edition, you’ll know that the adventure cards included with the game are a bit different to what you’d find in 4th Edition! Not only have they got a new layout and awesome new artwork, but many of the cards have been tweaked to better fit the rules and design of Talisman: 5th Edition.
This is what all the cards looked like before our awesome art team got to work!
And this is what they look like in-game now!
While we’ve still currently got some work to do to make all the artwork for these cards viewable in the current build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’ve been able to update all the cards with their updated rules text, and they all function as they should in 5th Edition. Part of the benefit of working with a stripped back Talisman engine (check out the long analogy above for reference!) is that we already had a system in place to handle how standard rules in Talisman work within the game.
One of the more interesting things our QA team found in a development build - multiple Hexes!
For example, if we have an adventure card that makes you gain 1 gold, and an adventure card that makes you gain 2 gold, we don’t have to specifically program that individual card to give you 1 gold. Instead we can assign the same ‘give 1 gold’ action to that card that we do for all other in-game actions that give you 1 gold.
Setup a Build Machine
One of the earlier things we did for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is something we do for all our games, but is still an important milestone! For those unfamiliar with build machines, it’s basically a server that is used to package everything that a game needs into a format that a computer (or console) can open and run.
Because Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is being worked on by multiple developers here at Nomad, it’s important that we can all separately work on the game and make changes at the same time, so we can work together efficiently. Now that the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition build machine is all set up, we can create testable, playable versions of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition whenever we need/want to.
New Effects System
We’ve been making digital board games for over 11 years now here at Nomad Games, and since then we’ve learned a lot about ways we can make your digital board gaming experience more exciting. When you’re playing a digital board game, you can add all sorts of shiny effects, sounds and visual flair that you’d never see if you’re playing with plain ol’ cardboard.
We’re still finalising a lot of these effects before we show them off to you, but one effect we can show you is how we’re adding a subtle parallax effect to all adventure cards - if you’ve played Mystic Vale (one of our previous digital board games!), you’ll recognise the technique we’ve used. This time, we’re keeping it a bit more subtle though, we don’t want to distract you too much from what’s happening on the board!
Check out the parallax effect on this army of Gnomes - enough to fill a garden!
New 3D Characters In-Game
If you’ve played Talisman: Digital Edition previously and zoomed in as close as you can, you might have noticed that the character models aren’t actually 3D. Instead, it’s a 2D image that we rotate and move so that it gives the illusion of a 3D model on the Talisman board. If you’ve never noticed this before, we’re massively sorry for shattering your world-view.
Check out these early renders of the classic Talisman roster!
Thanks to the upgrades we were able to make to the Talisman: Digital Edition engine (check out the “Stripping Back the Talisman Engine” section earlier!), we’re now able to fully render characters in 3D on the board. So you can appreciate them from every angle, just as you would with the physical game!
The Monk, off on another adventure in all his three dimensional glory!
Want to see what the back of the new Wizard looks like? We’re proud to say we’re making your dream a reality.
And Even More!
What we’ve covered above is only a peek at what we’ve been working on for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - we’re going to be sharing even more behind-the-scenes looks at the game as it goes through development over the coming months.
So if you want to see more of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all our socials, and wishlist the game!
If you’d like to find out more about Talisman: 5th Edition, you can do so by going here!