24th January 2022
OUR 2021 STUDIO RETROSPECTIVE
Hi everyone!
2021 was a wild year for us here at Nomad, so we want to take the time to go through everything that happened of note, the lessons we’ve learned and what we’re going to be taking with us into 2022!
We don’t want this to just be a celebration of all the things we’ve done, but instead want to take the time to acknowledge where we could have done better and where we still need to improve both for ourselves and for all of you.
So without further ado, let’s get to it!
Fury Mobile + 4v1 Update
We had to reach far back into our memory banks to remember this one, as it happened right at the start of the year! We brought Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition to mobile, allowing even more players to join in the hunting fun. We also pushed out an update that allowed 4 players to go against 1 online
The 4v1 update is where we can learn the most lessons - when we launched Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition with only 1v1 online supported, the number of players who voiced their frustration with this was large! We explained that we’d rather launch the game with one missing feature rather than hold the entire game back, but people were still understandably disappointed.
If we’re put in a similar position in the future, we’ll be able to look back on how we communicated the lack of 1v4 at launch and the feedback we received.
Of course, hindsight is 20:20 - we can’t know how much better Fury would have performed had it launched with 1v4 from the start. We also have to contend with the fact that as long as a game remains unpublished, it’s not making back any of the money we’ve spent on development to make it. As a small studio, we need to be very aware of our own financial position when making these kinds of decisions. A double-edged sword we now at least understand better!
Talisman Challenge Update
With all these other companies offering ‘live services’ and really upping their game when it came to in-game meta offerings, we decided it was time to update Talisman to bring it into the world of 2021! Read more about the update here.
This was our second free update to Talisman following our free profile update, and built upon what we’d added then. We added rotating challenges for players to complete that would reward them with titles and profile icons based on their accomplishments.
Since then, we’ve seen that:
People tend to spend more time playing Talisman after they launch it.
People tend to play Talisman more often.
Players who have earned a lot of achievements will come back to play Talisman more than they previously did.
We wanted to make Talisman more engaging outside of playing the game itself, and give players more things to enjoy while they played it. We understood that to a lot of players, losing in Talisman can be frustrating as it felt like they’d not made any sort of progress.
Our main lesson from this experience was that we should take these systems forward into future titles so that we can offer players more outside of the board game. We also made sure to clearly communicate to our community that even though we were adding these features, they wouldn’t be available to purchase through an in-game store in any way. We’re aware that these kind of features (especially rotating challenges and rewards) are often a feature of games that feature microtransactions and in-game stores. Our community appreciated us cutting off their worries before they could have them, which is something we’ll definitely continue to do!
Working on Fury
This year was when we started to wind down working on Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition as we’d released all the major updates we had planned and we’d released the mobile version.
One of the biggest things we’ve learned from this year is managing expectations for players - when we explain why we’re not rolling out updates and bug fixes as often once a game has been out for a while, people on the whole tend to understand. Going forward, we want to be more upfront about what our plans are for post-release fixes, updates and content in our games.
We don’t want people to go onto the Steam forums for one of our games and find a community post titled “Is this game abandoned?” as that can put off a lot of people. We’d much rather post a “State of the Game” blog ourselves which honestly and in detail goes over what we’re going to be doing for each of our games so that players know exactly what to expect when they purchase one of our games.
Electric Square
This year, we did some work for hire! We’re super proud of our talented team here at Nomad, so whenever someone reaches out to us we see if we can help them. We helped our friends over at Electric Square with their Apple Arcade title Detonation Racing by lending them some development support.
Not only does it give us a chance to flex our muscles on projects that aren’t just digital board games, it also helps solidify our relationship with other games studios - something we’ve especially appreciated in a year without any in-person events!
Working with Dovetail
Last year also marked the beginning of our partnership with the lovely folk over at Dovetail Games! Since then, they’ve published Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition onto Xbox and PlayStation for us (more about that here!), and are working alongside us to make our version of Catan. We’ve worked with publishers before, but Dovetail bring a unique knowledge-set with their experience in hobby games like Train Sim World and Bassmaster Fishing. Learning how our titles cross-over in terms of audience has been eye-opening for us here at Nomad, and their increased team size has helped us learn what gaps we currently have in our own teams that we could fill in the future.
We’re still based in Lymm and Dovetail Games are based in Brighton. For context (courtesy of Google Maps), that’s either a:
4 hour and 15 minute car drive
4 hour and 40 minute train and bus journey
75 hours of walking
22 hours of cycling
4 hours and 45 minutes if you took a flight!
6 hour journey for an unladen African swallow
So while we wouldn’t have been meeting up with them once a week in a normal world, we’ve still only managed to actually meet up with them a handful of times over the past year - which isn’t super helpful when forging such a close relationship! Our biggest lesson from this relationship has definitely been that starting a new relationship without being able to actually meet face to face with our key contacts.
Catan
Our biggest announcement to come out of last year was that we’re going to be bringing Catan to PlayStation and Xbox! This is something we kept under wraps for a good while (always referring to it as our ‘secret project’) as we’d already been working on it for a while by the time we actually announced it.
Our biggest lesson from Catan is that our hard work towards making ourselves known in the world of Digital Board games has been worth it! This contract wouldn’t have been possible if not for our contacts in the industry, our track record and our proven ability to produce high quality digital adaptations of much loved board games.
We’ve also learned that it’s tough to explain why we’re busy working on another project while people are expecting updates for our existing games - with a small studio like ours, we can’t always work on something new while also working on updating our older titles. Again, this is something that a lot of people appreciate once it’s been explained, but if they see a game without any updates it’s only natural that they want to know why.
We’re still knee-deep in the development of Catan, so we can’t share any real lessons we’ve learned so far - but we’re happy to confirm that all the hard work we’ve done on other games up until now is already informing our decisions and making Catan a better game for it!
Celebrating 10 years of Nomad
Last year we officially marked 10 years since Nomad was founded! We wanted to celebrate by going to a board game café to meet up properly, but sadly due to COVID-19 we had to postpone that until things got safer.
The main lesson for us here is that whatever we’ve been doing over the last 10 years must be working out for us if we can keep on making games! Also, don’t plan a gathering in late 2021, because it won’t happen.
Monthly Mailbag
Another thing we launched last year was our series of ‘Monthly Mailbags’. Every month, we take community questions and answer them - no matter how specific or strange they might be! Check out our very first edition of it here.
For the very first issue, we got about 20 community questions come in - clearly it’d been something that people were keen to ask about! Not only has the monthly mailbag given you all a better insight into how we do things here at Nomad, it’s given us insight into what you all care most about! One of the reasons we’re doing this retrospective on 2021 in the first place is because of the Monthly Mailbag.
It also highlighted things we weren’t aware of previously, like a demand for more content in Talisman: Origins. Even if that demand doesn’t directly result in more content for that game, we’re now keeping single-player content in mind going forward. For example, previously we’ve focused on multiplayer and offering player vs AI as a single player offering. If people are more interested in there being a story involved as they play, we can look at offering that as an option.
Also, since we launched the Monthly Mailbag, our usual monthly income for questions is around 5-6. We’re hoping that as time goes on this slowly increases, but the very first edition with 20 questions was a big task!
Consoles
We’ve put out games for console in the past, but this year we really focused on games consoles. Between Fighting Fantasy Legends on Switch, Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition and updating the PS4 version of Talisman, we’ve been spending a lot of time with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.
One of the reasons we went to Dovetail as a publisher, was due to their wealth of experience on console - something we’re happy to acknowledge we needed! Each console has its own unique back-end system for us to get our heads around and remember how to work. Due to this, it normally takes us much longer to publish anything to console than it would to Steam.
We also had some help from our good friends over at Auroch Digital when it came to the console version of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition. They helped point us in the right direction when we got lost on what buttons needed to be pushed, as another studio much more experienced with console ports than us. Another example of 2021 being a good year for inter-studio relationships, despite not being able to meet up in person!
There are also a ton of different console features (news, social sharing, clubs etc.) that we still aren’t taking proper advantage of to increase our presence there. We want console players to know we’re as cool as we think we are, and part of doing that is sharing updates and news like this with them!
Steam Tabletop Event
Organised by the lovely folk at Valve and Auroch Digital, last year saw the return of the ‘Digital Tabletop Fest’ to Steam. You can still check it out here if you missed it!
In terms of sales and exposure, this event was one of our best Steam sales for the whole of 2021. The combination of developer talks, a big push from Valve and it specifically being about board games meant that we got a huge, engaged audience that was looking to buy digital board games!
Of course, we’re going to do everything we can to keep that success going into 2021, with our efforts going further for similar events and making sure we complement sales with talks, streams and other fun things.
Special Effect
This year we also continued to support our good friends over at Special Effect. Back in 2015 we created the Shaman Character for Talisman: Digital Edition, and have since provided Special Effect with all the profits from sales of that character.
In 2021, Beverly Dunne (our super cool Finance Administrator here at Nomad) became a Special Effect ambassador. As a Special Effect Ambassador, Beverly has become even more involved with the great work that they do. We also took part in their ‘One Special Day’ sale over on Steam, where we donated proceeds from the sale to help support Special Effect continue providing people with physical disabilities the ability to enjoy video games.
What have we learned? That supporting a charity feels great!
Working from Home
A lot of companies talk about 2020 and 2021 as a year with ‘a lot of challenges’ and ‘a tough year for all of us’. For some reason, it feels like nobody wants to call COVID-19, COVID-19! We’re happy to bravely say that COVID-19 made 2020 an awful year for a lot of us, while also acknowledging that we got off very lightly as a company. As a small games studio, our work transitioned very easily to a work from home environment.
We started working from home in 2020, but 2021 was officially our first full year of the majority of our staff working from home. As such, a lot of it was ‘more of the same’ and applying what we’d already learned in 2020. We’re using a mixture of Discord and email to keep in touch with each other, along with weekly video calls where we show each other our cats and latest haircuts.
With things slowly opening up again (and closing again too) we’ve had a number of discussions between ourselves about what working at Nomad will look like in the future. We currently have a few staff who still use our office and plan to continue doing so, and we still want to have a physical office. An office location gives us somewhere we could still meet up with external companies to have meetings and facilitate an office for staff members who would rather work outside of their homes. It also means we can do in-person interviews and see new starters face-to-face to help them get used to who they’ll be working with!
However, with the majority of us working from home now it’s made us realize that we could probably work with a smaller office - something that 2021 really hammered home!
Thanks for reading our full retrospective, and we can’t wait to keep being awesome in 2021, so don’t forget to stay tuned to our Facebook, Twitter and Discord for announcements, insights and more!