6th May 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - APRIL 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
We’re back again with another month of news from the Nomad Game tent, with updates on how Catan is progressing, a look back on launching for the Windows Store and of course another month of community questions!
Nomad News
Work carries on with Catan
April was another super busy month for us here at Nomad when it comes to Catan! We’re still not in a position where we’re comfortable showing off what the game looks like just yet, but each month we’re getting closer and closer. We can’t wait to share more details, screenshots and videos of the game in action once we’re happy with it!
But what we can do is talk about all the cool stuff we’ve been developing and updating in the game! So over the last month, we’ve been working on:
Improving dialogues
To clarify, when we talk about ‘dialogues’ we specifically mean the menus that appear when we’ve got something to tell you! For example, when you need to choose a resource type, there is a menu that appears. Turns out, Catan has quite a few different places where different menus will be needed, so we’ve been going through and making sure that all these menus work as they should and make sense to a player!
Making sure all the button prompts look correct
With this being a console title, we’re making sure that using a controller to navigate the game is as easy as possible. As such, we’ve spent some time in April going over the different button prompts we use in the game to ensure they’re clear and you can tell exactly what you need to press to do what you want. Again, this is something that sounds simple - but we need to make sure we get it right early on so that when the game does come out, all the hard work has been done in advance.
Figuring out the best way to present information for the player
Similar to the work we’ve been doing on the button prompts, we’ve found that one of the most important things in a digital board game is making sure that players have access to all the information they need to make a fully informed decision. This month, we’ve had some good discussions about the different options we have, taking into account feedback we’ve had from players of our previous games over the years.
Improving the trade functionality we have already
At this point in development, we’ve managed to get the trade dialogue and all the mechanics you need to facilitate a trade in place, but it’s still a very basic implementation. When we first started working on Catan, we knew that trading would be one of the more complicated mechanics to implement in the game. Thankfully, it only happens at a specific time during each players turn, so we didn’t have to worry about allowing people to constantly interrupt each other with trades. We’ve still got some work to do in order to make sure all kinds of trades work, but we’re getting there!
Making the Robber screen
Another key part of Catan is the Robber. As it’s something we know will come up multiple times in a single game, we’ve put extra effort into the dialogue screen that appears when you’re making the choice of where to move the robber to, and then who to steal resources from. This month, we’ve managed to settle on what we hope will be the final version of the Robber screen!
Adding warning icons for certain moves
Want to build a City but don’t have the resources you need for it? Or do you want a build a settlement but there aren’t any valid locations? Now the game will tell you directly what the issue is! If you try and do something that is impossible, we’ve got little warning dialogues that pop up to tell you exactly why what you’re trying to do isn’t possible. Another example of ensuring players have all the information they need to make an informed decision!
Getting our credits list together
Another job that always needs doing, is getting our credits list together! The Nomad team has changed a bit since we launched Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition and might change further before Catan officially hits console (check out our careers page!), but we at least now have a credits list ready that we can edit and update as we need to.
Figuring out what icon to use for AI
This might seem like a simple choice, but it turned out to be more of a debate than you’d imagine! Finding something small, easily recognisable and that translates well over multiple languages. We managed to settle on something we all agreed worked, but it wasn’t easy. So when the game does come out, make sure you take a moment to appreciate the craft that went into the AI logo.
Creating cool animations for characters and icons
We don’t want to brag, but we’re absolutely smashing it out of the park with our characters, icons and animations in Catan! We’re still working on finalising a lot of these animations and characters, but we’re super happy with what we’ve made already. Once we’ve got them finished properly, we’re super excited to show them off to you all.
Talisman hits Windows Store
At the very start of April, we launched the Windows Store version of Talisman: Digital Edition onto the world! You can read the full announcement for the release here on our website.
Since the release at the start of the month, we’ve been working alongside those lovely folk at Microsoft to iron out some technical issues that players were having installing the game through the Windows Store. We’re pretty sure that all the kinks are now ironed out (big thanks to some of our Discord members for talking us through their issues), but if you’re still having issues, please reach out to our support team!
New Bundles for Legendary Decks on Steam
If you haven’t already picked up the Talisman: Digital Edition - Legendary Decks on Steam, we’ve just added discounted bundles to each and every one of them on Steam, each one containing the original expansion and its associated Legendary Deck together!
And because this series of bundles is a ‘Complete Your Collection’ style bundle, if you’ve got an expansion but not the Legendary Deck, you’ll automatically get 10% off the Legendary Deck.
For example, do you already own The City Expansion and want to pick up The City Legendary Deck for it at a discount? Now you can with The City Legendary Bundle.
Or have you been eying up the The Dungeon Expansion, and want to get it and The Dungeon Legendary Deck together? The Dungeon Legendary Bundle is here for that.
We stream even more!
If you haven’t tuned into our weekly streams (every Thursday over on our Twitch Channel) then you’re missing out! Through April, we were streaming Talisman with our community, showing off the best that Cat Lady and Mystic Vale had to offer and chatting nonsense the whole way!
Below you can find our upcoming schedule for the rest of May, so make sure you come along to see us play some of our games, chill out with our lovely community and show off our office cats!
Monthly Mailbag
With the updates out of the way, let’s get on to the questions we got in April!
From Gavin
[For anyone who missed Gavin’s previous question, you can find it in last month’s news round up.]
Given how het up people get about random numbers (and I feel your description of the process as generating a 'list' of numbers at the start of the game doesn't help much), I wonder if it's worth having a FAQ or web page all about PRNGs. There's so much people don't understand (as evidenced by the post on the Steam discussion forum suggesting generating a bunch at a time, then manipulating the result to get a 'better' random number - no, that won't change anything), so a clear (and I admit that's the tricky word) explanation might close down a lot of complaints. You could even print pseudocode for the one you use. Links to some web sites that talk about random number generation in detail might even help. https://ezcalc.me/pseudo-random-number-generator/ is a pretty neat site where people could actually see that the 'unfair' runs they complain about do happen naturally.
Anyway, enough of randomness.
Not surprisingly, given the recent release, I've been playing with Legendary decks a lot recently. They have pros and cons, but they're certainly an interesting addition to the game. Is there any chance of them being created as physical cards, for use with the actual board game - that'd be very cool.
Finally, a suggestion for an addition to the game... The AI is a bit stupid at times, we all know that. I'm guessing it's an if..then rule based system - what about 'open sourcing' the rules? No idea how you would manage that efficiently, but I'm sure there could be a fair amount of interest in adding or tweaking rules. One feature that might help is a button in the UI for taking a snapshot of the current game (screen shot, player states, recent moves and cards) with a space for the user to say what the AI should have done vs what it did. This could also be useful for bug reporting.
We actually had a chat about this on our Discord very recently! One of the reasons we added a ‘player statistics’ option to the Profile page for each player is that we can show the number of each dice roll players have made. For example, here are Toms:
We hoped that this statistic would help players see that while there is of course some variation in the numbers they roll, on the whole the dice rolls for each number even out in the end. Since we implemented this feature, we’ve been able to point a number of players to these stats so that they can see for themselves that their dice rolls do even out - even if it doesn’t feel that way as they’re playing.
We’ve got no idea how we’d go about open sourcing the rules either, but it’s definitely an interesting idea! We’d have to go through each submission that gets suggested though, which would take some time. Big agreement on it being useful for bug reporting though! A few years back those super cool folk over at Unknown Worlds did a GDC Talk on their own bug reporting system that is quite similar to what you’re describing. Give it a watch here.
When it comes to actually implementing it, putting that kind of elaborate system into place on top of all the code we’ve already put into Talisman: Digital Edition sounds pretty messy. It could be done for sure, but it’d be much easier for us to take this kind of system and build it into a game from the ground up.
From Karl
“When is the Talisman RPG game releasing on Steam? And please in German language.”
We’re assuming you’re talking about the Talisman Adventures RPG game! Sadly that’s not something we’re involved with, so we’re not sure if it’ll ever release as a digital version. It’d certainly be cool to see Talisman venture more into the RPG space, as the Adventures RPG looks mighty fun. When the Nomad team can gather together into the office, we’ll definitely be having a game night with it.
Double sadly, that also means we wouldn’t be able to help with a German language version. But as a studio with a lot of German fans, we’re happy to push for more German translations everywhere!
And that’s the end of this months update and mailbag! Thanks to everyone who sent in questions, and don’t forget to send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk if you want us to answer your burning questions next month!