13th January 2025
NOMAD GAMES 2024 STUDIO RETROSPECTIVE AND LESSONS LEARNED
Hello everyone!
What a year 2024 was for our small studio! Obviously, there was one big major event that dominated all our time last year - the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition! Between announcing it, releasing it and then all the feedback we’ve had since then, it’s been our focus for the entire year.
But when you’re focusing on such a big release, it can be easy for a game studio like ours to not take the time we need to properly reflect on things. So just like for the last few years, we wanted to take the time to go over everything that has happened to us over the last year, the lessons we’ve learned and the things we’ll be taking with us into the future as a game development team! So for each highlight, check out our Lessons Learned, where we talk specifically about what went right, what could be improved, and what you can expect from us going forward.
But before we dive in, the entire team here at Nomad wants to thank absolutely everyone who’s supported us, whether that’s through purchasing games from us, sharing things on our social media channels or telling your friends just how good Talisman is, and that they should definitely try it out.
2024 was a very, very wild year for our studio, and we’re going into 2025 with big expectations for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - we’re off to a strong start with the foundation we’ve laid so far, and can’t wait for you to join us on this exciting new adventure.
Talisman 5 Announcement
The biggest announcement that we’ve ever made as a studio was that we were officially making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!
All the way back in May it was officially announced as part of the Warhammer Skulls Festival, with the announcement trailer debuting as part of the showcase of exciting new games.
Before the trailer dropped, we already knew that tons of people had expressed interest in us making an adaptation of the 5th Edition of Talisman. So we already knew there would be a good reaction from you all, but we were absolutely, absolutely not prepared for the full reaction we got from the announcement. To say we were overwhelmed would be an understatement, and for our small studio, the reaction from you all was absolutely one of the highlights of 2024.
Lessons Learned
To be honest, ‘making an exciting announcement will get people excited’ isn’t really a lesson we needed - we figured that one out on our own!
However, there are still a number of things we took away from the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition announcement that we’ll be taking with us into 2025. Firstly, it’s that having a Steam page ready to go (and that people can wishlist) is absolutely essential, as most of our wishlists came on that announcement day.
Secondly, it’s that leveraging our awesome community to spread the word is something that we should do more of. Given the size of our team, there is only so much we can do when it comes to getting exciting news out. Looking at how much further the news travelled because of either word-of-mouth or just people sharing the news themselves really helped to put into perspective how much we have an awesome, influential community.
Fury of Dracula - The Immortal Update
Alongside working on new games in 2024, we took the time to go back to a fan-favourite title that has an incredibly dedicated fanbase - Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition!
Since launching the game back in 2020, we’ve kept a close eye on the close-knit community that has sprung-up around the game, and all the feedback they’ve given on ways the game could be improved over the launch version. After having some behind-the-scenes discussions with certain community members (you know you are!) on how we can make the game better for the entire playerbase.
This all culminated in the May launch of The Immortal Update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition, bringing an absolute heap of improvements, fixed and quality of life changes to the game. The patch notes for the update might just be the biggest we’ve ever published as a studio!
Lessons Learned
Since launching The Immortal Update, the game has gained even more popularity, with a burgeoning tournament scene, tons of strategy discussions and a welcoming community of players. While this was great to see, it also brought in a fresh wave of players too, showing that coming back and updating a game based on a build-up of community feedback can absolutely be worth it. Oh, and if you’ve not picked up Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition in 2024, you owe it to yourself to correct that mistake - just don’t forget your garlic.
Talisman: Digital Classic Edition goes Free-to-Play
Alongside the release of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, there was more big news in the digital Talisman space in 2024 - specifically that Talisman: Digital Edition was going to become Talisman: Digital Classic Edition, and that the base game was going to be made free on certain platforms!
Making the base game free is something that we’d discussed, debated and considered for quite a while, as it’s a change that once you make, there’s no going back. However, when we weighed out the pros and cons of making the change, we realised that getting Talisman: Digital Edition into the hands of more players (especially with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition coming out soon after) would mean that more people would be willing to try the game out and play it with their friends.
Both physical and digital versions of Talisman is a game that is made much better when experienced with friends and family, so lowering that barrier to entry made a lot of sense - and given that we’d heavily discounted the base game over the years, making it free wouldn’t have a massive impact on our expected sales figures.
Also, we knew that even once Talisman: Digital 5th Edition was launched, we’d still want to support Talisman: Digital Classic Edition - so making the game free-to-play and using it as a way to offer people a ‘taster’ of the Talisman experience meant that from a business perspective, we’d have more of an incentive to keep the game supported and active going forward. This would always be a good thing for people who are already playing Talisman: Digital Edition too!
Oh, and having more people for online matches is always, always a good thing. A bigger player pool means more people to turn into toads!
Lessons Learned
Does ‘this was a good idea’, count as a lesson learnt? Because it definitely was!
Since making the base game free, we’ve had more than 400,000 new players jump into the world of Talisman digitally, which has been absolutely amazing to see.
Not only have we seen way more players get introduced to the game, the change has not had any negative impact on our sales, reviews or perception of the game.
DLC Carryover Announcement
When we originally started work on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we sat down to discuss all of the lessons we’d learned from our time working on Talisman: Digital Classic Edition. With 10 years of development and updates behind it, there’s a lot of things we now take for granted compared to when we originally launched it all those years ago.
One of the main things we raised was the fact that when Talisman: Digital Classic Edition originally launched, to call it bare bones would be an understatement. Many of us forgot that at launch, the game didn’t even have online multiplayer! But, over the last 10 years, we’ve put out a ton of different expansions, characters and more for Talisman: Digital Classic Edition, meaning that players have come to expect a wealth of content to choose from when setting up their games. For many players, the Talisman experience is now defined by expansions and customisation at this point.
With that in mind, we knew that Talisman: Digital 5th Edition was always going to be launching at a disadvantage when it came to content - so we started looking at what we could bring to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to fill in that content gap that players would feel. Which is how we came to the decision to remaster existing 4th Edition expansions!
Even for players who’ve never played a physical game of Talisman before, we knew that expansions like The Reaper, The Frostmarch and The City had become staples, so bringing them into 5th Edition made total sense. However, we knew we wouldn’t be happy with simply dropping those older expansions into 5th Edition as-is, after all the hard work that had been put into redesigning the core Talisman game. So, we made the decision to put in the effort needed to bring these classic expansions in-line with the 5th Edition experience, including the artwork, mechanics and deck editor customisability!
Oh, and as thanks for supporting us for 10+ years, we also announced that you could bring across your existing expansions to access the remastered, 5th Edition versions entirely for free.
Lessons Learned
As we’ve spent some time in 2024 developing The Reaper Classic for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we can already share some details about what we’ve learned from the remastering process. First of all, the most resource-intensive part of remastering an expansion is the artwork! Bringing all of the existing artwork into the new 5th Edition style is a process that takes time, especially with our small art team.
From a development perspective, we’ve already spent 10 years adding new expansions to digital Talisman experiences, so we went in knowing a lot already! This is our first time adding an expansion specifically to 5th Edition however, so we had some new features to account for, specifically the Deck Editor. Thankfully, both in terms of testing and developing for, adding a new expansion so that it works with the Deck Editor was a breeze!
Because we’d designed and programmed Talisman: Digital 5th Edition specifically knowing that we’d be bringing a ton of future content to it, we’d put the tools in place to make the process of adding more expansions easier than it ever had been in Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
So if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that putting in the work to make future jobs easier is absolutely worth it.
Talisman: Digital 5th Edition Launch
By far the biggest event for our studio in 2024 (and for our studio this decade, we imagine!) was the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. And since 14th November, 2024, thousands of you have already joined us on the start of this new adventure.
With developer streams, tons of awesome influencers giving the game a whirl and hype around the launch, 14th November went by in an absolute blur. Honestly, it’s actually quite difficult to look back on the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition objectively - because the entire day went by so quicky.
Lessons Learned
By far the biggest lesson we learned from the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is the importance of testing on a wide range of different device setups, as much as we can. At launch, a number of players experienced issues that were caused by the type of PC system they had, which nobody here at Nomad had access to (and therefore hadn’t been able to come across the same issue).
Since launch, we’ve expanded our range of beta testers to include more players on a wider range of systems, and we’ll be running our beta tests longer too. This is something we’ve already implemented in 2024, and plan on expanding in 2025!
Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - Post-Launch Updates
Just because we finished development on the launch version of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, doesn’t mean that we were planning on slowing down at all!
Since we launched the game in November, we’ve rolled out a ton of patches and updates for the game, both big and small! From bug fixes to community-requested features, we’ve kept up a good pace when it comes to deploying new patches for the game.
This hasn’t always been easy however, as we’ve needed to make sure we prioritise things correctly, and focus on the issues that you all want us to tackle first!
Lessons Learned
This isn’t so much a lesson as a reinforcement of something we already knew - launching on Steam alone means that for a team of our size, we can quickly deploy patches and updates onto a single platform without having to worry about cross-compatibility or going through an approval process with that platform.
Surveys
In 2024, we wanted to make sure that we took the time to properly listen to feedback from you, our awesome community. With that in mind, we put out a number of different player surveys throughout the year to gather your thoughts and feedback in a constructive way.
And you all absolutely confirmed that you had thoughts you wanted to share with us! With over 1,000 responses coming our way across all the surveys we’ve ran in 2024, you’ve made your thoughts known on Talisman and a whole heap of other things.
Lessons Learned
In 2024, we learned just how useful surveys can be for us - many of the decisions we made in 2024 were made taking into account feedback from our surveys, which meant we could be a lot more confident in what we were doing!
So, going into 2025 (and beyond) we’re going to make sure that regular surveys are part of the toolkit we use when developing our games.
More Secret Project Work
Back in 2023, we spent a good chunk of our yearly retrospective lamenting the fact that so much of that year was spent working on projects which (at the time) we couldn’t publicly talk about. Given that those projects included the (then unannounced) Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we hope that you now all understand why we were so keen to keep them under wraps!
Lessons Learned
While 2024 was absolutely the year of announcements for us here at Nomad, we also continued working away in the background on things we can’t speak about just yet!
So, one of the big lessons that we’ve learned is that even in a year when our team is focused on the biggest project we’ve ever undertaken as a studio, there are still going to be things happening behind the scenes that we can’t talk about!
So that’s the end of our 2024 retrospective! It’s been an insanely busy year for our team here at Nomad, so it’s been nice to stop and take stock of all that’s happened to us. When you lay it out like this, it makes us massively grateful for all the love and support we’ve had from you all this year.
As we enter 2025 with Talisman: The Reaper Classic on the horizon for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition (and all the other cool updates we’ve got planned), we’re looking forward to delivering you all the best Talisman experience ever. With all the lessons we’ve learned in 2024, we know we’ll be able to bring you even more great experiences, games and more.
See you at the end of 2025 for another retrospective, and in the meantime make sure to follow us all the places we are online!