1st July
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JUNE 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
Another month whizzes by here at Nomad, with Humble Bundles, Catan development and much more! We’ve also noticed that we’ve been slowly getting fewer questions in every month to our Monthly Mailbag, so we’re putting in another call for community questions. Just send your deepest thoughts to questions@nomadgames.co.uk and we’ll give the best questions Steam keys for our games!
And without further ado, let’s get through these updates:
Nomad News
Humble Talisman Bundle Launches
In June, we teamed up with our friends over at Humble Bundle to launch the Talisman Complete Collection Bundle! Containing everything we’ve ever made for Talisman: Digital Edition and Talisman: Origins, you’ll have more Talisman than you’ll know what to do with!
With 2 entire games and 52 pieces of additional content, this is the best deal we’ve ever done on Talisman. Not only that, but as with all Humble Bundles, you can choose how much of your purchase goes towards charity.
Since the bundle launched, we’ve already raised over £10,000 for charity - which is amazing! The bundle is live until the 6th of July, so you’ve still got a chance to pick it up if you haven’t already. And to everyone who has already picked it up, a massive thanks from all of us here at Nomad. A few years back now we launched the Shaman character for Talisman, and have donated all the proceeds from that character to our good friends at SpecialEffect. But being able to do even more for charity is always a good thing!
Catan development continues
Another month goes by, and more Catan milestones are being passed! This month, our team did the following as part of Catan development:
Making sure you can get to your development cards
This month, we spent a good while discussing how we’d allow players to view development cards when your inventory is already open. As we’re designing Catan for consoles, we’re firmly aware that there are only so many buttons on a controller we can use for different functions. We also want to make sure that buttons for navigating menus are placed in a way that’s easy for a player to quickly understand - so it’s tough to make that happen with limited options! We’re pretty happy with the solution we came up with though, but we’ll be further playtesting it and getting feedback internally to make sure it works how we want it to work.
Adding debug options for our Quality Assurance team
Not everything we’re developing and adding to Catan will make it to the final version of the game, as some features are there for our internal teams only. One of these additions that we’ve implemented this month are debug features that allow our testers to add specific cards to their hands. When you’ve got tons of combinations of cards to test to ensure there are no bugs or conflicts, being able to quickly select which cards you have in your hand is a life-saver for our team. Of course, as the ones using this feature primarily they have a lot of input into exactly what they need to most efficiently test the game.
Linking up with Dovetail more
Since before Catan for consoles was even on the menu, we’ve been in good contact with our publisher Dovetail Games! This month though, we had a lot of great meetings and introductions between us for marketing, QA teams and much more. While our studios are 209 miles away from each other, thanks to the wonders of the internet we can chat to each other as if we’re around the corner. As we get closer and closer to release, that good communication between our teams will become much more important - which is why we’re making sure to start on the right foot and carry on that way!
Adding a carousel for development card selection
Want to select from all the different development cards in the game? Easy! We’ve made a browse-able carousel that you can flick through to find the card you want. Less easy for us though was deciding what order we should put those cards in! Do we do it alphabetically and start you at the beginning of the alphabet? Or do we show you them in order based on how many are in the deck? In the end we settled on showing you the cards alphabetically, but it’s a good example of how we need to think about things that wouldn’t even cross the mind of the average player!
Organising online matches with Dovetail
Normally when testing online functionality in our games prior to release, we’re only really able to test in internally on the same network in our office. We could also test remotely from our homes to see if a different network would cause any issues, but that’s not ideal conditions to see what is the root cause of any issues we uncover. Now that we’re working alongside Dovetail Games (and their own internal QA team) however, we can finally coordinate online games under proper testing conditions. This should hopefully massively increase the number of bugs we find and can therefore iron our before release!
Secret projects continue to be secret
While we’re busy with Catan, we’re still finding some time to work away on the two different secret projects we currently have under our belt. We don’t have much to share right now, but we’re still working on them - don’t worry!
Fury of Dracula League sign-ups open
The super awesome Scotsword over on our official Discord (which you should totally join!) has organised a Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition League!
If you want to take part, you can find the sign-up form here.
You’ll also need to be part of our Discord to play, which you can find an invite to here! Once you’re a member of our Discord, we’ve set up a dedicated channel just for the league, the direct link for the channel is here.
New stream schedule for July
Want to know when we’ll be streaming and what games we’ll be playing? Then have we got good news for you! We’ve published our official stream schedule for July, which you can find below:
That’s right eagle-eyed reader, we’re going to be playing some Wingspan! Developed and published by our good friends over at Monster Couch, we’ll be streaming ourselves playing it at the end of the month. You all really enjoyed our Gloomhaven stream (which you can watch here on our Youtube channel) when we did it, so we thought it was only fair we try out another game!
Monthly Mailbag
With the updates out of the way, let’s get on to the questions we got in May!
From Ben
“How many board games do you have in the Nomad office, and how often do you actually play them?”
We’ve actually got a few games where we own multiple copies and multiple translations of the same game! But avoiding counting those, we have around 94 games and expansions here in the Nomad office.
In terms of actually playing them, sadly after everyone got sent home after covid we haven’t had a chance to get everyone together and have a board game day. So much so, the lowest shelf of one of our board game shelves is looking a bit cobwebby… and those spiders aren’t even paying any rent!
From Sebastian
“Have you tried any of the older versions of Catan to see what they did right and what they did wrong?”
For digital versions, we’ve tried out Catan Universe on Steam to see what cool stuff they’ve done on their adaptation. If we add house rules in the future, we’ll probably have a look at other digital versions just to get an idea of what they implemented.
For physical versions of Catan, we’ve not played any older versions of the game - the main reason being that it doesn’t really make sense for us to do so. We’re making an adaptation of the current version of Catan, not an older version. Those older versions might have older mechanics or different rules - but the only rules we need to worry about are the ones in the current version of Catan.
Looking at older versions can sometimes cloud our design vision for an adaptation - when we were making Talisman: Digital Edition for example, we purposefully didn’t look at previous editions a huge amount. It’s far too easy to fall down the rabbit hole of “Why did they get rid of this mechanic? We should re-add it.”
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!