1st February 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JANUARY 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone!
For our first studio round-up of 2024, we’ve pulled out all the stops! We’re covering not only all the cool stuff we did in January 2024, but all the cool stuff in December 2023 too. While we were quiet over the Christmas period, we still make some exciting developments with CATAN® - Console Edition, our secret projects and more. Lucky for you, we’ve covered each and every exciting development in one handy place - right here in this studio round-up!
So given that we’ve got a lot to cover this time, we’d better get started!
In both December and January we continued working hard behind-the-scenes on CATAN - Console Edition development, with the Nintendo Switch version taking up most of our focus. We’ve made some big strides with The Cities & Knights Expansion though, along with general improvements to the game too.
Some of the highlights of development over the last two months included:
Updating the Match Results Screen
For anyone who doesn’t know, the Cities & Knights Expansion adds a bunch of new mechanics to the game, meaning that the results screen at the end of the game needed to be updated to reflect things like “Times Won the Defender of CATAN VP Award” and “Metropolises Owned”. Back in December, we put together this new results screen that you’ll see if you’re playing with Cities & Knights, and it looks great!
Patches, Patches and more Patches
Rolling out the Cities & Knights Expansion fully involves us pushing our biggest patch to CATAN - Console Edition that we’ve done since we launched the game. While we’re well versed in rolling out patches and updates for our seasonal content packs, rolling out an update this size (especially on Nintendo Switch) requires us to go through more steps than we usually do. The good news is that we’ve got through those steps successfully now, and some fresh patches are going to be making their way to you all!
Bloom & Grow Content Pack
Alongside our work on Cities & Knights, we also spent some of December/January working on the Bloom & Grow seasonal content pack! Just like our other content packs, we’ve been working hard to bring an exciting new look to all aspects of the game once you enable it. It was very weird for us to be working on Easter/Spring themed artwork while in the middle of our Christmas preparations though!"
Feedback from CATAN on Cities & Knights
As part of developing Cities & Knights, we’ve been handing over early development builds of the expansion over to our good friends over at CATAN Studio, the people responsible for making sure we’re doing everything correctly and as they’d expect. Not only do they make sure we’re portraying the game to their standard, they also give feedback on how information should be displayed to the player and more. In January, they came back with some more feedback for us which we’ve been working to implement, to make the expansion even better!
Cities & Knights Tutorial Videos
If you’ve played CATAN - Console Edition, you’ll know that there are in-game video tutorials to help you learn the game before you dive in. In order to help new players get to grips with the Cities & Knights Expansion, we’ve added some new video tutorials specifically for the expansion. These videos are now in the development build of the game, and work great!
As always, you can find out more about CATAN - Console Edition over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website!
One of the very first things we did once we got back from our Christmas break as a studio was roll out the update on all platforms that enabled cross-platform play between the Nintendo Switch and the Xbox/PlayStation versions of the game.
We massively appreciated all the patience that you showed as a community while we worked to roll out this update, and the feedback on the CATAN - Console Edition Discord so far has been positive!
At the start of 2024, we published our now-traditional yearly studio retrospective! Just like the last two years, it’s a chance for us to look back on all our accomplishments and milestones as a studio. But we don’t want to just look back with rose-tinted glasses, so for each milestone we noted the different lessons we’ve learned from it (both positive and negative!).
It’s well worth a read, as we go over almost everything that happened last year! Check it out here.
In January, applications opened up to take part in the New Blood community tournament for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition. Geared specifically towards newer players in the tournament scene, it marks the 4th community-run Fury of Dracula tournament to take place. We’re massively proud of the awesome community of vampire hunters that has developed around the game, and watching your matches is always fun! You can find out more about it over on our Steam announcement for the tournament.
A ton of new players joined up and agreed to take part, and a bunch of matches have already taken place already! You can check out a playlist that showcases some of the matches over on the New Blood Youtube Playlist.
As we get closer and closer to actually announcing the secret project we’ve been working on for many many months, we ironically can share less and less of what it’ll be, because we don’t want to lessen the impact of the big reveal!
What we can say is that we (as always) appreciate your patience and anticipation for whatever we’re working on next, and can’t wait to show it to you. What we CAN tell you is that our publishing team currently have a to-do list of things they need to prepare for the official announcement, and that to-do list is now nearly halfway complete.
So please continue to watch this space!
Back in December last year, we released the latest patch for Talisman: Digital Edition, which contained a whole heap of new bug fixes, improvements and removed a bunch of crashes that were being caused in specific situations. As always, a bunch of these bugs and issues were originally reported to us via the Steam forums or through our support team. So to everyone who reported issues or bugs you found while playing the game, we massively appreciate it!
You can read the full patch notes here.
As we’re covering two months in a single monthly round-up, we’ve also got two months worth of questions from the community to answer! Two of these questions also come from the ‘Monthly Mailbag Questions’ channel to our Discord, which you can find here!
From ¡¡Milej!! (Not Milei) via Twitter
“Is there one person responsible for all the community posts? And what's their fav Talisman character?”
There is indeed one person responsible for all the community posts, the Nomad round-up, the emails you get and all the updates and news for each of our games on their Steam pages. Oh, and our developer streams and answering these mailbag questions too!
That person is Tom Young (aka me), our resident Marketing Executive, and my favourite Talisman character is by far The Sprite. Being able to always have at least 2 spells and cycle through all the powerful effects that they can give you is just such a huge advantage over the course of a game. Thanks for asking!
From Recardo Bruno via Twitter
“next board to digital is really WotR?? Don’t play with our hearts.”
While we’ve had some fun with teasing people on our social media channels about whether or not we’re making a digital adaptation of the War of the Ring board game, we also know that it’s not fair to get peoples hopes up about an adaptation that they clearly have a lot of love for. We can confirm that we’re not working on a digital adaptation of the War of the Ring board game, as much as we’d like to. Don’t get us wrong, we’d love to do it if we got the chance - but as of right now, we’ve not got the opportunity to do it.
From Quincy Morris via Discord
“When Fury of Dracula bug fixes?”
A good question that we’ve got a good number of times at this point! For those unaware, we’ve not rolled out an update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition since March of 2022. Since then, we’ve still kept an eye on bug reports on our Discord and the Steam forums, but aside from that we haven’t had the time or resources to dedicate towards a new patch or build of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition.
Right now, it’s hard for us to justify dedicating the time and resources that a patch would need towards Fury of Dracula as doing so isn’t going to result in the same amount of increased sales as say, working on this new expansion for CATAN - Console Edition will. The biggest reason we’d have to come back to Fury of Dracula and work through the list of community requested issues and bugs would be a port to a new console (Nintendo Switch, anyone?). Until then, we can only say that we appreciate all the bug reports as it means if/when we do come back to the game, we’ll have a definitive list of what needs fixing.
From CreatorsMaker via Discord
“When will Mystic Vale be released for Android 13?”
We’re currently aware of an issue on Android where some of our titles (namely on Mystic Vale, Smash Up and our Fighting Fantasy games) don’t run on Android 13. We’re going to be investigating a fix for all of our titles that currently have this issue, to see what we can do to fix it. We don’t have an ETA on when that fix will be possibly rolled out, as we need to thoroughly investigate what’s happened. So while we can’t give you an answer right now, we can at least confirm we’re aware of the issue!
From Pablo Daniel Bujan Matas via Facebook
“Please, we want to know what the secret project is!!! Please let it be an Arkham Horror Files game. Maybe the LCG perhaps… Well I ask, what game do you want to adapt to digital?”
Looks like this mailbag is the one full of broken hearts, as we can confirm that we’re not making an Arkham Horror Files game. We do have a copy of the game in the Nomad office, which we very much enjoy playing whenever we’ve got it out previously.
When it comes to what we’d like to adapt, a hidden information board game like Mafia or Werewolf would be a fun challenge. Oh, and Deep Sea Adventure just because it’s such a neat little game.
It’d also be fun to do one of the many racing themed board games out there, like Heat, Cubitos or Flamme Rouge! Castle Ravenloft and Shadows over Camelot are other games that spring to mind. We’d love to take a crack at a full adaptation of Betrayal at House on the Hill too, which would be quite the challenge, but a worthwhile one!
Oh, and there’s one board game we’d love to make a VR version of…
From Talisman Island via Facebook
“Timescape confirmed!”
First of all, not a question. Second of all, Timescape is always confirmed in our hearts.
From Christian Dixon via Facebook
“What kind of biscuits do you like? Also, I already know the game you guys want to adapt. It's Relic, of coarse!”
We also like Maryland cookies, Hobnobs, shortbread and Sainbury’s Triple Chocolate cookies. Oh, and if you agree that it’s a biscuit then you cannot beat a Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Biscuit.
From Jonathan Baker via Facebook
“More Talisman with extra Talisman, please... And: was Talisman Origins ever going to have co-op play?”
Request for more Talisman received, loud and clear. And Talisman: Origins was always conceived as a single player experience to go alongside Talisman: Digital Edition! We did debate whether or not we should add co-op play, but we were unsure on just how many players would actually be interested in such a feature that would take up a considerable amount of development time. Eventually we decided it was better to leave it out, but we did consider it!
From Julio Cesar via Facebook
“When PT-BR language in mobile version?”
A good question, however we can’t answer if you don’t tell us what game you’re asking for! To answer generally, we update the language options in a game when we either get a large demand for a specific language, or the publisher of the physical game requests that we add it. So there isn’t any particular languages we’d ever consider ‘off limits’
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
If you’d like to follow us, keep up to date with us and generally just see all the cool things we do, you can find all our social links, games and more over on our Linktree - how handy!