31st March 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - MARCH 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
Long time readers might have noticed something different in this month’s mailbag - it’s got a new name! But don’t worry, we’re still going to be answering each and every community question we get in, but as time has gone on we’ve looked at what we’re doing with the Monthly Mailbag and thought it was time for a name change to better reflect it’s purpose.
You see, since we came back from the Christmas break, we’ve been thinking about the following things:
The amount of questions we’re getting into the Monthly Mailbag has settled down to about 4-6 a month now. That’s enough to fill up a mailbag, but there’s room for more content there.
At the start of each Mailbag, we’ve been putting a short summary of all the different things we’ve been doing as a studio for the month. It’s a really nice way for us to quickly summarise what we’ve been up to here at Nomad.
We work on a lot of different projects, and it’s sometimes hard to find the right place to properly talk about all the cool stuff we’re doing. If we’re spread out over Talisman, Catan and Fury of Dracula across the month, chances are we’re doing smaller things with each of them, but it’s still all stuff we want to talk about!
Ages ago, we promised we’d publish a monthly email that went over all the different cool things we’d been doing - but sometimes it’s hard to put that together if we’ve only focused on one game.
So from these thoughts, we took a step back from the Monthly Mailbag and realised with a few small tweaks, it could be doing a much better job for all of you!
So we’ll keep publishing every single month, but now we’ll be putting more of an emphasis on updates for what we’ve been working on, and we’ll also be sending around an abridged version of this ‘Round Up’ via email every month - you can sign up for that by joining our mailing list!
Nomad News
So what HAVE we been up to in March? Well…
Legendary Deck on Switch and GOG
We brought out our 4 newest Legendary Decks on both GOG and Nintendo Switch, after a slight delay compared to the other platforms. It turns out that releasing 4 pieces of DLC across seven different platforms is quite a lot to juggle, especially when you’re aiming to release everything on the same day! You can now play with these new decks anywhere you can play Talisman: Digital Edition, and you can find out more about them here.
Bringing Talisman to Windows Store
The release is just a day away when we publish this, as we’re launching Talisman: Digital Edition on the Windows Store on April 1st! (We promise, that’s not an April Fools joke). After we had success with Talisman on Xbox, we started talking to those lovely folk at Microsoft about bringing Talisman to the Windows Store as well. You can find out more about what this means over on our announcement blog.
Released the German Update for Fury of Dracula
We released the 4.1.0 update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition onto Steam, Android and iOS this month, which included a heap of improvements, new house rules and the ability to play in German! Our Unity team have been working hard to get this update out, and it contains a number of different changes that were requested by our community either over on the Steam forums or on our Discord. If you reported an issue, thank you very much!
You can check out the full patch notes for the update over on Steam.
Continued Working on Catan
Another month goes by, and more and more Catan milestones are getting smashed! We’ve now got the game to a state where you can play an entire game from start to finish - which is great for being able to demo it to other people, and for testing purposes! It also means we’ve got all the different things we need for the game to function at least working, even if there’s still a lot of polishing to do.
We’re still working on adding more graphical elements to the game to both better convey information as you’re playing, and to help add to the experience of playing the game. When you win, we want it to feel like a well earned victory celebration!
Continued Working on Project Peanut-Butter
Alongside Catan, we’re working on a super secret project that we can’t talk about yet - hence the codename! Our art team have been hard at work on Project Peanut-Butter, as we’re currently at the concepting and pitching stage. That means that we mainly need to get an idea for what the game is going to look and feel like, as opposed to a fully working build. It’s looking mighty nice already though, so we’re hopeful that we can share what it is soon!
For those that don’t know, a lot of our projects go through an initial pitching phase, especially if it’s an existing IP where the licence holders want to know what our plans are before we start working. We’re very excited to be able to work on this project, as it would also mean potentially bringing on some more people to the Nomad team - the more the merrier!
Continued Working on Project Jelly
Alongside Project Peanut-Butter, we’ve got another smaller secret project that we can’t talk about yet, but we’re still working just as hard on! This is a smaller project, but we’re tinkering away at developing it and we already have a working build to try. This game features a theme we’ve never worked with before, so it’s making us flex some design muscles we haven’t worked before. In a good way!
We’re now streaming once a week!
In case you missed it, we’ve been streaming over on our Twitch channel once a week! Our current plan is to alternate between streaming Talisman and then another one of our games, so make sure you tune in every 13:00 GMT on Thursday to watch us.
Monthly Mailbag
With the updates out of the way, let’s get on to the questions we got in March! We got a bumper haul last month, as a number of people were late to our AMA over on r/Talisman and sent their questions in to the mailbag instead.
From Matgoeth
“Huge fan of Talisman here, thanks for constantly updating your game: I love new legendary decks and cannot wait for Deep Sea! I missed your AMA so I decided to approach you directly.
One (but huge!) question: could you maybe consider having multiple saveslots for multiplayer games instead of one? I tend to play in different groups of people and having at least 2 more saveslots for multiplayer would really mean a world to me.
Keep up the good job!”
Thank you for the kind words, and your question!
Internally, we keep a big list of all the different things that the community have asked us to do with Talisman: Digital Edition and multiple online saves has been lurking around the top of that list for a mighty long time. It’s something that would require quite a bit of work on our end, as the reason for having only one online save is due to how Talisman handles keeping track of online games for multiple players.
One of the questions in our recent Talisman: Digital Edition Survey was asking what players would like from us in the future - we’re pleased to confirm that multiple online saves is something that a lot of other people have asked about too!
From Sebastian
“I've seen the AMA you guys have done on the r/Talisman subreddit and one more question/issue comes to my mind, even though I'm late on the AMA.
So, when random character choice is selected (where at the beginning you can choose one of, say. 5 characters), after you die, you get to select a random character again. Which is perfect.
But together with a group of friends we came up with our own list of characters, with our own character randomiser in google sheets. So we can easily for example exclude all mages, or maybe exclude some of the strongest characters (we have also put them into subjective tiers). So we will randomise the character on our own, and then pick our randomised characters in the lobby.
But after a character dies we would like to again choose a character, just as it works with the built-in random character choice house rule. Sadly this is not possible, as you get the same character you just died as. Would it be possible for you to add this?
Or maybe, if it's easier, just default to the built-in randomiser from 5 (n) characters after the first death as a workaround. (Probably with a hardcoded character amount? as you don't get to choose the amount in house rules when you select "choose character")
No matter the answer, you guys rock! Thank you for allowing us to have this exquisite experience of being destroyed by the forest goat over and over again.”
We can definitely look into adding this - putting some kind of veto system would most likely solve this problem, if you wanted to keep the random pool limited to certain characters. We could also put in a house rule where those 5 you get to choose from initially are the only 5 you get to choose from for the rest of the game, although that might be a bit too harsh.
Leave it with us to think about! And thank you for saying we rock, we appreciate the kind words always.
And you are so welcome.
From Michael
“Hello, Nomad Games. Could you say your plans about new addition for Smash up in the near future?”
We’ve been asked this in the past a few times, and sadly our answer remains mostly the same:
Smash Up didn’t meet our expectations sales-wise, and the uptake for additional content was also lower than we’d have liked. It got to the point where it was costing us more money to make new content for Smash Up than it was making in sales. In fact, sometimes it would look like it’d never make the money back on the time and financial investment. While we’d love to keep making more cool Smash Up stuff (there’s certainly enough to sink our teeth into), sadly it seems like the appetite just isn’t there enough for us to justify it.
We know that’s not the answer you’ll want to hear, but hopefully it explains why we’re not planning on making new content!
From Gavin
“Having seen yet another post on the Steam forum about how the AI 'cheats,' and also noting people complaining about how the RNG is reset when people exit (single player) games while card ordering is retained, it struck me as one way for people to verify the randomness of die rolls would be to exploit that reset 'bug.' Specifically:
At some point in a single player game (say, with just one AI, to keep things quick) after rolling the die for movement, note the number exit the game before completing the go.
Restart, and you'll find yourself at the start of that move again. Roll again and note the number.
Repeat until thoroughly bored (and it does have to be a considerable number of times for the statistics to be meaningful) and count the number of times each die value turns up.
Of course, some people will say 'Ah, but the game's fair for rolling moves, it's just battles.' A more convoluted and tedious procedure is:
After both fighters have rolled (i.e., human and AI character or card critter) but before accepting the outcome of the battle, note the die rolls and exit.
Restart the game and reroll for movement - if you're battling an AI character, you may have to exit and restart several times, until you roll the same movement value so as to land on the character again; if you're battling a card, then landing on any square where you can pick up the card again is fine.
Redo the battle, note scores, repeat ad nauseam.
That ought to be enough to stop people complaining, if they're patient enough. (Or to highlight a bug in the combat system :-o) I wonder if this could be automated in testing to provide stats for users, if they're prepared to believe them (which could be unlikely since they don't believe devs on the Steam forum). Fwiw, regardless of people believing that the RNG is fair, if they're so upset about losing, just abandon a battle and restart as many times as necessary until they win - they can feel smug about how cheating defeats the 'cheating' RNG! (Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, but all this whining about being fair gets my goat.)
Don’t worry about ranting at all, that’s what the mailbag is here for! Players feeling like the AI or the dice are ‘cheating’ is something we’ve had brought up since the very early days of Talisman. While we’ve confirmed multiple times that there is no cheating AI, the dice rolls are indeed random and everything is working as it should be, people will still say the game is rigged!
We’re never mad when people bring this up though, as we understand it’s a natural human thing to see patterns where there aren’t any - there’s even a super fancy word for it (Apophenia, according to those nerds over at Wikipedia). As players, we also pay much more attention to our bad luck than we do anything else. If the last thing you want to roll is a 1 because you’ll get turned into a toad, you’ll put much more weight on the re-roll being a 1 than it being any other number. Those times it re-rolled a 1 will stick in your brain much more than the other times it rolls a 6. That’s just human nature! Our ability to judge probabilities is so skewed in fact, some games like X-Com have actually adjusted their percentages in order to better match up with with what players think their percentage chance would be. For example, an 80% chance presented in the game is more like a 90% chance - because 80% is high enough that it feels like a guaranteed hit.
And if we were only having to calculate hit chances, then the argument of the dice being rigged would make a little sense at least - however in Talisman there are thousands of things you need to roll dice for. And then you can have hundreds of thousands of combinations of items, spells and other factors on top of that. Making sure that in all of those different combinations, the dice rolls a certain way is just way more effort than it would be worth.
One of the reasons that the Challenge Update included a tracker for the number of each dice roll rolled was so that players could more easily see the distribution of their rolls over the course of many games. Even then, we know that this is a discussion we’ll have to have a lot of times, and we’re happy to have 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!