1st June
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - MAY 2022 EDITION
Hello everyone!
May (and half of 2022!) seems to have flown by, and we’re ready to talk about all the cool things we’ve been doing during the month! While we’ve been working away on Catan mostly, we’ve also been tinkering around with some other things - so let’s get into it!
Nomad News
We’re in the Skulls Festival
Our good friends over at Games Workshop have once again launched their annual Skulls Festival - a celebration of all things Warhammer, Games Workshop and more. As a good number of our titles are based on Games Workshop properties (Talisman: Digital Edition and Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition to be specific) we’re also joining in the Skull Festival celebrations!
Across PC, mobile and console we’ve got exciting discounts on almost all of our Games Workshop licenced titles, so now is the perfect time to pick up those Talisman: Digital Edition expansions you’ve been meaning to grab.
Not only that, but we’ve added some timed challenges to Talisman: Digital Edition for you to complete - and beating them will unlock an exclusive Skulls Festival avatar and title in-game!
More work on Catan
Our work on the console version of Catan keeps keeping on, with another month of development under our belts! In May, some of the development highlights were:
Longest Road Animation
Did you manage to earn the longest road in Catan and bag some sweet points by doing so? We want to make sure that your accomplishment is properly celebrated, so we’ve been working on making a cool animation to show that you’ve done it!
Character portrait animations
Our awesome art team have also been hard at work in May on the animations for the different characters you can choose to play as during your games. We want to inject as much character as we can, and can’t wait for you to see the finished product.
Loading icons
Another thing that’s easy to overlook when you think about “Things you need to do as part of making a game” is loading icons! In May, we went through a number of different potential icons that would appear on screen whenever the game was loading. In the end, we settled on one that we’re all happy with - but it wasn’t an easy choice!
Updating the resource selection screen
At certain points during a game of Catan, you’ll need to look at the resources you currently have and choose which ones to use, either for trading or otherwise. As it’s super important you can see what your options are, we’ve spent some more time making this screen as clear and easy to read as possible.
Character victory animations
Just like with the character portraits that emote while you play, we’re putting more effort into adding character to the game with victory animations for each selectable character in the game too.
A New Bundle for Talisman: Origins
What seems like a long time ago now, we release Talisman: Origins onto Steam - and until now, the only way you could grab it and all its DLC was to do so individually. But not anymore!
We’ve launched the Talisman: Origins Complete Collection so that people can pick up everything Talisman: Origins has to offer in one single collection. Check it out!
Our Streaming Continues
If you haven’t tuned into our weekly streams (every Thursday over on our Twitch Channel) then you’re missing out! Thanks to help from our community, our streams have gotten better and better each passing week - they’re almost professional now!
We’ve now published our schedule for June, so make sure you come along:
Monthly Mailbag
With the updates out of the way, let’s get on to the questions we got in May!
From Ben
“I know you all specialise in board games, but do you think you'd ever do a game that isn't based on a board game?”
We actually have done some work on games that aren’t board games! A while back, we worked with our good friends over at Electric Square to make .
Outside of working alongside other developers, we’d always be open to the idea of making a non-board game video game. We’d just have to have the right project come along! Also, there’s a lot to be said for leaning into your expertise. We’ve learned a lot over the past 6+ years about digitising board games, which means it’s a genre we feel a lot more comfortable in than say, a platformer game.
From Sebastian
“Why do you only stream on Thursdays? I work on Thursdays and would love to watch you on the weekend”
Tom is the one who does our streams (and writes this update blog too!) and works a 9 to 5 job as our Marketing Executive here at Nomad. As such, he can only really stream during office hours, and we picked Thursday as it’s the day least likely to face disruption from launches, end of the week last minute things and anything else!
We hope you appreciate that for the sake of his own sanity, Tom would rather keep to streaming during work hours so that he’s not in ‘work mode’ non-stop.
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!