9th February 2023
NOMAD GAMES 2022 RETROSPECTIVE
Hello everyone!
Last year, we published our first ever studio retrospective (which you can read here if you’re interested!). With us now officially in 2023, it’d be rude not to do it again right?
As we expected going into the year, 2022 was all about one thing - CATAN® - Console Edition! Our team started 2022 working hard on the game, and we finished the year working just as hard on it! But it wasn’t all sheep, bricks and wheat - a ton of other cool things happened to our little studio throughout the year. And now seems like a perfect opportunity to go over the lessons we’ve learned, our successes as a studio and what we can improve this year!
So without further ado, let’s go over some of the biggest highlights from last year. For each topic, we’re going to go through our Lessons Learned, and break down what we’re going to take into 2023 from each of the things we managed to do last year.
There’s a lot to cover (understandably), so let’s get going!
CATAN® - Console Edition
Our biggest highlight of 2022 was all the work we did on CATAN, unsurprisingly! We started the year with a ‘functional’ version of the game, in that you could boot it up and ask it to do things.
However, we still had a ton of placeholder artwork (at one point, the Robber was literally a collection of emoji’s dressed up as the robber that moved around the map). Things like the dice rolling hadn’t even properly had gravity applied to them, and none of the gameplay flows for things such as trading had even been decided upon.
With each month that went by however, we made more and more progress towards the version of CATAN - Console Edition you’ll be playing mighty soon (as of writing this retrospective!).
Once the game has been fully launched, we’re planning on doing more retrospective looks and deep dives into how we designed the game and what went into making the decisions we did. So for now, we’ll just say that CATAN was a great example of taking everything we’ve learned as a studio and applying it to a single project. And we’re extremely proud of the results!
If you want to check out all our hard work, head over to the official CATAN - Console Edition website.
Lessons Learned:
Our biggest lesson we can already share from our work on CATAN - Console Edition is that we can take on a project of this size. We’ve been slowly taking on bigger and bigger projects over the years (both in terms of development requirements and popularity of the board game we’re adapting), but the jump from Fury of Dracula to CATAN was the largest we’d ever done.
Now we’re hiring more staff and looking for our next big project, which we wouldn’t have necessarily had the confidence to do without CATAN under our belts!
Project Peanut Butter
While we’ve been spending 2022 working hard on CATAN, we’re very aware that keeping our catalogue diverse is the best way to make sure we can keep making awesome games. Last year, we worked a pitch for something we called Project Peanut Butter - a digital board game adaptation of a much loved modern classic.
Sadly, the publisher we pitched to didn’t want to fund the project.
Our faces when Project Peanut Butter didn’t go ahead.
But it’s okay - when you’re spinning lots of plates, not all of them stay up! This is just part of being a games studio. Also, part of the reason the project didn’t go ahead was due to the online structure that the publisher wanted the game to use - something that was out of our control anyway.
Lessons Learned:
Sometimes when pitching a new digital board game, losing out on a pitch can give you a massive amount of information. Being able to talk to a publisher directly helps us understand what’s being looked for in games right now, what games are primed for an adaptation and where gaps in the market are.
We’ve got lots of awesome pitches and ideas ready to kick off 2023, taking on board our lessons from Project Peanut Butter.
Legendary Decks: Round 2
In 2022, we launched 4 more Legendary Decks for Talisman: Digital Edition. This time around, we made Legendary versions of the Frostmarch, City, Blood Moon and Sacred Pool which we then released on all the platforms you can grab Talisman! When we originally released the first 4 Legendary Decks for Talisman, we weren’t sure of how they would perform financially. If they managed to sell well, our plan was to carry on making more - if they didn’t make their development costs back, we wouldn’t.
Then, the Legendary Decks awkwardly did the one thing we didn’t expect them to do - they managed to land right in the middle of our sales expectations. They didn’t sell enough to justify making Legendary Decks for each and every expansion in Talisman: Digital Edition, but they also sold well enough to justify doing some of the expansions. So, we decided to work out the 4 most popular expansions and make Legendary Decks for them, as a compromise.
Lessons Learned:
We took much of the feedback from the first 4 Legendary Decks, and tried to adjust our second wave of decks to better match player expectations. When we originally revealed the Legendary Decks, players expected not only for the game to be harder, but for the support they received from positive items/characters to be higher too.
In our initial design, we had the goal of ‘Make Talisman harder’. We certainly achieved this goal, but we didn’t convey to our players that it was our goal. Therefore it wasn’t the feature we pushed in promotional material, and players couldn’t set their expectations correctly.
When we originally pitched CATAN, we focused very much on the idea of the island itself coming to life as you played. Now that launch day is just around the corner, we’re making sure to highlight that feature - so players know exactly what to expect, and can have appropriate expectations!
From ‘Monthly Mailbag’ to ‘Monthly Round-Up’
This year, we answered a grand total of 29 Monthly Mailbag questions! This was also the first year where we had a month without any questions come into the mailbag. As we started 2022, we realised that our influx of monthly mailbag questions was slowing down as time went on. We were also using the monthly mailbag as a way to update you all on what we’d been doing in the previous month. With each passing month, the monthly update section kept getting larger, while the monthly mailbag section kept getting smaller.
So, we decided to change up how we did things! The Monthly Mailbag became the Monthly Round-Up, and has been that way ever since.
Lessons Learned:
When sharing news about all the cool stuff we do here at Nomad, it’s not enough to expect people to come to us with questions about what we’re doing. Sure, some people will have a very specific idea of what they want us to give insight into, but a lot of people won’t!
We needed to appreciate that there’s a balance to strike between sharing information and asking for what our players wanted to hear from us. We’ve always aimed for as much transparency as we possibly can deliver with all of our communications, and that’s something we definitely feel has been appreciated through 2022, and we’re going to continue with.
Talisman on Windows Store
After bringing Talisman: Digital Edition to Xbox, we started to look at what would be involved in bringing the game to Windows Store too. After all, we’d already made two different PC builds of Talisman: Digital Edition already - one for Steam and another for GOG. And as the Xbox and Windows Store developer tools were highly similar, it would make sense to put in the effort required to jump the final hurdle, as we were already so close anyway.
So, in April of 2022 we launched Talisman: Digital Edition for Windows Store - you can find more about it here.
Lessons Learned:
As our first ever title to be released on the Windows Store, most of our lessons came from the use of the store itself and seeing what the developer process was like. Despite Talisman: Digital Edition being our flagship title as a studio, we were honestly a bit disappointed with how the game performed on the Windows Store. It was still worth it given the low barrier to entry that working on Xbox provided, but it’s made us think harder about bringing our games to different storefronts/platforms in the future.
Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition German Update
Our latest update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition was released last year, which included a range of bug fixes and support for German as a playable language. This largely was facilitated by the console edition of Fury of Dracula we’d released the year before, which incorporated this new fixes and features already. You can read more about it here.
Lessons Learned:
This was the last major update we released for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition, as our team needed to move over to fully working on CATAN - Console Edition. When we launched this update we weren’t 100% sure if this would be the last major update we’d release, but as development for CATAN got fully underway it became more clear.
As a small studio, it’s tough for us to provide a ton of support and/or updates for our older titles. If we spend a week making a new patch for Fury of Dracula, that’s a week we have to delay CATAN for.
League of Dracula
Speaking of Fury of Dracula, our awesome community organised and ran the first every Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition tournament at the end of last year! Featuring members of our Discord server (which is super cool and you should totally join), the tournament lasted most of winter!
In the end, the mighty Scotsword emerged victorious. During the tournament, our Discord was alive with hunter and vampire discussion of tactics, previous matches and plenty of friendly trash-talk between players.
Lessons Learned:
Our community is awesome! For real though, this was the first time we’d properly collaborated with our community to make a great tournament event around one of our games.
We provided all of the support they needed to promote the event, but other than that, we just let them run with it!
As a way to get people more excited about Fury of Dracula, it’s had a big impact from what we can see. More people are making the time to engage with the community over on our Discord, and it’s great to see.
Our First Super Sale
As part of publishing our own games, we also need to ensure we’re making the most of sales events as they come up. Generally, we line up our cross-platform sale events with whenever the big platform holders are running their own big sales.
As we’ve only got a single person in our marketing team, it makes a lot more sense to put all our effort into a single week of promotion for sales - it’s more efficient to send out an email that highlights all the sales you’re running in a single week across all your platforms, compared to having to send a different email every week to Steam, PlayStation and then Nintendo Switch players, for example.
Lessons Learned:
Now that we’ve got a large back-log of titles under our belt, we can throw around our weight a bit more as a publisher without needing to rely on platform holders as much for organised sales!
As we look to the future (especially working as a publisher for other studios), we can make more of a mark in the digital board game space than ever before. And so we shall!
Streaming Weekly
One of the things we wanted to commit more to last year was using our Twitch channel to engage with all of you lovely lot much more! After looking at what other studios were doing on Twitch, we decided it would work better to stick to a routine schedule every week - so every Thursday at 1pm GMT, we picked a digital board game to play and played it!
We also occasionally played digital board game adaptations made by other studios. We started doing this in 2022 because we wanted to:
See for ourselves what other studios were doing in the digital board game space
Share our insights as a digital board game developer
Highlight the cool things other, smaller studios are working on
As we go into 2023, we’re hoping to spend more time increasing the viewer counts on our streams so we can engage with more of our awesome community.
Lessons Learned:
Turns out, streaming to a schedule isn’t as easy as it seems! With just one person managing the Nomad Games marketing, publishing and having a life outside of work too, we’ve missed a handful of our scheduled streams in 2022. Thanks to COVID finally getting it’s hands on him, we’ve missed some January streams too already.
However, even when we’re not there every single week, we get a group of regular fans and viewers who tune in to chat, talk about our games and find out more about us as a studio. For some people, tuning into our Twitch stream is their preferred way of finding out what we’re doing!
Looking at our Twitch streams as a way to complement the community engagement we’re already doing has become the best way to look at what we’re doing over there. We’re not going to set the world on fire with our stream numbers, but for the dedicated fans who care about what we do, it’s a great way to engage with us.
Talisman Humble Bundle
Back in June, we launched The Complete Talisman Collection Bundle with our friends over at Humble Bundle, which included every single thing Talisman we’d made that was available on Steam. You can check out how many bundles we sold over on the Humble Bundle website.
This was the first time we’d included absolutely everything Talisman in one bundle, and the response was awesome - seeing Talisman veterans help guide new players into what they should try first to help them avoid being overwhelmed was a special highlight.
Lessons Learned:
While players will be picking up your title (and all it’s DLC) at a hefty discount, we’ve not seen too much of a long-term effect on our Talisman sales on Steam since running this bundle. We initially went into this deal with Humble under the assumption that it’d effect our long-term sales for a good while (as so many people would pick up the bundle), but it hasn’t been as bad as we anticipated.
Especially for such a long-running game, the bundle performed really well. So if you’re a studio thinking about running something similar, we’d recommend it!
£44,000 Charity Milestone
Thanks to all the support that The Complete Talisman Collection Bundle managed to raise, we managed to hit a new milestone in the amount of money we’ve raised for charity! Back in 2015, we released The Shaman for Talisman: Digital Edition, and have been donating all the profits from it to the lovely folk over at SpecialEffect, no matter which platform The Shaman was sold on.
So when you combine all of the sales for The Shaman with the Humble Talisman Bundle, we’ve raised a whole ton of money to support great causes.
Lessons Learned:
Supporting charity is a lesson we’d already known, thankfully! However, actually looking back at the £44,000 we’d raised for charity helped to put into perspective just how much of an impact we can have through the work we do.
So our lesson here is to do more!
Ready Set Bet Companion App Launched
We hit another company milestone last year, as we finally ticked off something we’d been planning on doing for ages. We made our first ever companion app!
Back in 2022, our good friends over at AEG (who we’d made digital adaptations of Mystic Vale and Cat Lady for) reached out to us with a proposal: Making a companion app for an upcoming board game.
While we’d made plenty of digital board game adaptations, a companion app was completely uncharted territory for us. After discussing it internally and figuring out exactly what we’d need to do, we decided to take on the project.
And then in September, we launched the app to coincide with the physical release of the game. Reception for Ready Set Bet was positive, with many praising the app (which we definitely appreciated hearing!).
You can try the app yourself and find out about the game here.
Lessons Learned:
While there are a lot of similarities between designing and programming a companion app, a few unique hurdles presented themselves during development.
Firstly, this was the first time we ever had to account for events happening outside of the ‘game’ we were developing. While that might seem obvious from an outside perspective, we’d spent the last 10 years making sure that all of our titles keep track of scores and player progress as the game goes on. The idea that we didn’t have to worry about that initially threw us off, and we needed to approach the design in a different way.
Working for hire to make a companion app was a great experience overall though, as it helped us demonstrate our skills outside of our usual wheelhouse - and put the industry contacts we’d gathered over the years to great use too.
Celebrated our 11th Birthday
2022 marked 11 years since we’d originally formed Nomad Games. That’s a lot of time to look back on! Instead of going over everything again, check out the full blog here.
Lessons Learned:
Time marches ever onwards, and looking back can be very humbling! Too often, we’re caught up in chasing the next project or working on what we’re currently developing to actually stop and take stock of everything we’ve done over the last 11 years.
While many other games studios have come and sadly gone, we’re still standing. We’ve made some awesome games, created many friends in the industry and been supported by a community that has grown with us over those years. So here’s to 11 more!
Moved Offices
This one sounds far more dramatic than it actually is, but we did technically move office last year! Previously, we were in an office that was too large for what we realistically needed - so we moved from the ground floor to the next floor up! Our new space is much more suitable for us, as the majority of our team has been working from home since the lockdown of 2020.
Lessons Learned:
Sometimes a smaller office is just as good as a big one, and having to use stairs every day is actually quite good for your health! We did discuss whether or not we did still need an office space now that so many of us work from home, but as expenses go it’s something we’re still very happy to do.
It gives the people who do want to work in an office somewhere to go, gives us somewhere to gather for meetings and helps us when we have new starters join. Having somewhere for new staff to come into and meet up with the people they’ll be working with helps people put faces to names.
New Staff Members Join the Team
Last year was a great year for Nomad as a studio, and we want to keep that greatness coming! As part of that, we decided it’s about time we start bringing some awesome new talent on board, and we hope to continue to do so this year.
Back in October, we welcome Dave on board to the programming team - he’s already proven to be an awesome addition to the team and helped us make CATAN even better.
Lessons Learned:
Even with us moving to a working from home model, we want to make sure that new starters feel properly welcomed to the team. We still haven’t figured out a time to get us all together in one place, which is something we need to work on.
Once CATAN launches, we’re hoping to get everyone together to celebrate - previously when people were in the Lymm offices, we’d go out for a meal together after a successful launch.
Nomad Christmas Giveaway
When you’re working on a project that you can’t show to anyone, it’s tough to make sure that people still care about what you’re doing. You also need to make sure that you can leverage the games you’ve made in previous years to ensure your studio can stay afloat while you work on the next big thing. We’ve felt this in previous years, but the combination of CATAN being our biggest project yet, working from home and the general state of the UK at the moment… has meant we’ve never felt it so keenly.
An artist depiction of the Nomad team working from home in the UK.
So in order to thank our fans, we ran a giveaway over the holidays and then proceeded to give out a whole ton of free Steam keys to people who signed up to our newsletter. Not only did we get a big wave of people signing up to our newsletter (which we appreciate, as it means more people hear about future cool stuff), but people got free stuff out of it!
Lessons Learned:
People enjoy free things. Okay, that isn’t really a lesson that we needed to learn, but this was the first time we’d ran this kind of giveaway through our mailing list.
As successful as it was as a delivery method, it also helped us bump up our numbers - and if there’s anything that marketing people love, it’s bumping up numbers. So in the future, we’re looking to offer more giveaways and generally give away more cool, free stuff - because it’s a win-win situation!
Nomad Development Services
The latest addition to this round-up, right at the end of 2022 we finally made public something we’d been working on and thinking about for a long while! See, we’ve gained a whole ton of contacts in the games industry over the years that we’ve been working as a games studio. Over the years, we’ve been asked to help with projects, and bring our experience to the table to help get games over the line.
This year, we’ve decided not to keep that side of our business so quiet! We’ve officially opened up the Development Services side of our business to the public. You can find out about it here!
Lessons Learned:
As we only launched this incentive at the end of 2022, it’s a bit too close for us to properly look back on how going public with these services has worked out for us. We have however had a good amount of interest from people looking to work with us, so fingers crossed it helps us do even more awesome work!
That’s the end of our 2022 retrospective! Thanks for supporting us through another year of game development, and make sure you follow us on all the cool social media platforms to keep up with our latest news!