1st September 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - AUGUST EDITION
Hello everyone!
August has come and gone, and with it the sweltering UK weather also seems to be easing up. One of our directors even managed to go camping! What isn’t easing up is our hard work here at Nomad to keep bringing you awesome digital board games, streams and exciting new stuff to play with!
We actually have a number of staff holidays happening here at Nomad this September, which means that for a while our regular meetings are going to be a bit quieter than usual. One of the downsides of being a smaller studio is that when a handful of people are on holiday, we feel it much more than a larger studio would.
But we still need to recharge our collective batteries, especially as we get closer to the sprint that always happens between October and Christmas (which is only 115 days away for those not keeping track…)
But enough of that, it’s time to talk about the fun things we got up to this month!
Nomad News
Catan Development Updates
Another month goes by, and more Catan development happens! With a lot of the core game now nailed down, we’ve been able to work on some more exciting features. Including things we still can’t talk about just yet, but we can’t wait to shout about once we can!
Some of the highlights for Catan development this month includes:
Adding functionality to support video playback during the game
For those of you who’ve never harvested sheep in Catan before, we’ve got you covered with a video tutorial! One of the tutorials we’ll be offering will come in the form of a video that you’ll be able to watch, so we’ve had to implement a video player and the means to watch that video. It’s not something we’ve done before in any of our games, but luckily it’s not too difficult so far!
Fixing some audio issues
We’ve been working alongside Dan Meadowcroft (who composed the Fury of Dracula soundtrack!) to make sure Catan sounds as good as it looks. Implementing all the sounds properly always tends to be a tricky process, as you want to make sure the player can hear everything without all the sounds competing against each other for no reason. This month we’ve managed to iron out some issues that were causing audio to not work as we wanted. Success!
Resource harvesting animations
You’re going to spend a lot of your time in Catan gathering resources, right? We want to make sure that gathering resources feels satisfying to do, and clearly communicates to everyone playing exactly who got what. That’s why we’ve spent some time this month putting extra effort into the animation that plays whenever you gain resources.
We’ve moved offices!
While this might sound dramatic, it’s much less drastic than you’d initially imagine! For a long while now, we’ve been working in an office space that was much larger than we actually needed - since the lockdowns began here in the UK and we all started working from home, actually.
Well, we’ve finally moved our office into a new space… within the same building our old office was! That’s right, instead of being on the ground floor, we’re now on the first floor.
With so many of us working from home, it just made sense to use a smaller space. A number of us have been through office moves throughout our career, and we have to say - moving your office within the same building is by far the best way to do it!
Announcing our first official companion app
Back at the start of August, we officially announced that we are making the companion app for an upcoming board game from AEG, Ready Set Bet. Designed by Mystic Vale designer John D Clair, Ready Set Bet is a board game all about placing your bets on different horses, hedging those bets and watching the dice rolls spur on the racing towards the finish line.
The lovely folk over at The Dice Tower took a look at the physical game recently, and were very impressed by the sounds of it. But don’t just take our word for it!
Our companion app takes on the role of the announcer, handling dice rolls and allowing players to fully focus on placing their bets before their opponents do. While the app hasn’t been released just yet, we’re going to be rolling it out soon to coincide with the launch of the physical game onto board game store shelves near you. So stay tuned!
We celebrated our 11th birthday!
On August 26th, we very happily celebrated our 11th birthday as a games studio! It’s not been a smooth ride, but we’re happy to look back and see that we’ve kept going from strength to strength. With another year under our collective belts, we took the time to look at how exactly we got our start, as we turn to the future and start thinking about the next 11 years!
You can read all about our history, find some old photos and see how we transformed from 5 people to our current 15 member team right here.
And of course, we can’t fail to mention the fact that we wouldn’t have been able to keep going over the last 11 years without the support of all our fans and supporters. Whether you’ve purchased our games, shared our news or just told your friends about how cool our games are, you’ve directly helped us keep making awesome games. So thank you!
Running our first ever super developer sale
On August 12th, we launched our very first cross-platform super publisher sale - with discounts across Nintendo Switch, Steam and mobile, it was our biggest discount push we’d done ever!
Previously, we’ve always rolled our sales and discounts into bigger store-wide sales (e.g. Steam season sales, Nintendo promotions) so we were quite nervous to see how we’d be able to perform without that kind of support!
Thankfully, you all came out in force to pick up games, expansions and more! Keeping the money coming in helps us keep the games coming out, and we’ve been mighty impressed with the figures so far, so from the entire Nomad team - thank you for the support!
We streamed for a whole week!
To coincide with our super developer sale in August, we spent August 15th till August 19th streaming every day! This was definitely an eye-opener for us, as we’d never done it before. If you’re curious as to what we did, you can find all the information here.
In September, Tom (the person who does our streaming AND writes these monthly round ups!) is going on holiday, so he won’t be able to jump onto our usual weekly stream. But once we’re back, we’re going to be giving away keys every single week live on stream - now that we’ve figured out how to do it automatically through the power of Twitch bots!
Monthly Mailbag
For the first time since we launched the Nomad Games monthly mailbag, we’ve not actually had any questions!
Either you’ve all run out of questions to ask us, or it’s been a slow month - either way, don’t forget that you can send any and all questions you have for us to questions@nomadgames.co.uk.
We’ll answer your questions and send Steam keys to the best questions!