1st August
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JULY EDITION
Hello everyone!
We’re officially in August, after surviving the hottest day on record here in the UK! Thankfully nobody here at Nomad was too badly effected, and we hope you all stayed hydrated - no matter where you live.
Because none of us turned into puddles, that means we’ve got news and updates to give you!
Nomad News
We Raise Over £44,000 For Charity
Back at the start of July, we rolled out the Complete Talisman Collection with our good friends over at Humble Bundle. We also got a lovely update from the super cool folk over at SpecialEffect, letting us know how much money we’ve raised for them since we’ve started donating to them.
Between both the Humble Collection and our donations to SpecialEffect, we’ve now raised over £44,000 for charity! We couldn’t have raised this awesome figure without your help, that’s for sure. You can read more this milestone in our full announcement.
Discord User Milestone
In July, we officially passed the 3,000 users mark on the Nomad Games official discord! We’ve been slowly growing the community over there since we launched it a few years back, and we’re super happy with the chill, helpful community of people on there. If you’ve not joined it yet, what are you waiting for?
Fighting Fantasy Legends Celebrates 5 Years
On July 27th, Fighting Fantasy Legends officially celebrated its 5 year anniversary of launching on Steam! We’re still massively proud of our work on both it and Deathtrap Dungeon Trilogy, and we’re always happy when new players tell us how much it captures the spirit of the original gamebooks.
So a big happy birthday to Fighting Fantasy Legends!
Catan Development
Another month, another bunch of milestones being smashed through in Catan!
We spent a whole load of July designing the Catan tutorials, as it’s one of the most important aspects of the game - there’s not much point in making your game amazing if people don’t know how to play it! One of the reasons that the tutorial comes after we’ve developed a lot of other features is because we need those features to be implemented before we can start building the tutorial too.
With this being a console game, one of the requirements for launch is achievements/trophies! Between us here at Nomad, we’re coming up with a list that should manage to challenge even a Catan veteran. Something we’ve learnt over the years is that achievements also can help players experience games in ways they never would have thought to before, so we’re hoping we make you flex those Catan muscles!
Our artists have been hard at work making awesome characters to add some life to the game, and in July we made some changes based on feedback we’d got from people involved in the development process. Now we think they look even better, and can’t wait to unveil them!
Streaming Don’t Stop!
As is tradition at this point, we spent every Thursday of July chatting, playing and answering your questions live on stream over on our Twitch channel.
Some highlights include us trying out Wingspan and battling against the community in Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition (sadly we got quite thoroughly trounced, which shows the skill that people will be bringing to the League of Dracula!)
If you missed any of our streams last month, don’t worry! We’ve got a fresh batch of streams coming your way in August, the schedule for which can be found below:
Monthly Mailbag
From William
“When will you update the artwork on the cards of the Talisman games?
It looks dated and compared the modern CCGs, boring. I recommend looking at some card battlers and see the art style on their cards.”
Because Talisman: Digital Edition is based on a physical board that a lot of people have nostalgia for, we don’t want to go changing the artwork too much. This is partly because of that nostalgia, but also for memory reasons - one of the ways that more experienced Talisman players are able to speed up their sessions is by just looking at the artwork instead of having to read the card.
From Gabrielle
“Absolutely love Talisman and play it all the time. I still have the 1983 original board game but this digital version is best. I was wondering when there would be some more expansions as it has been quite a while and even a bundle of new cards for existing expansions would be welcome. Apologies if this is always being asked .“
We can’t share anything right now about what we’re planning next for Talisman, but as soon as we can do we will! And absolutely no need to apologise - the fact that people keep asking about this tells us that it’s something people really want!
From Adam
My name is Adam and I’ve recently become a fan of Talisman digital edition. It has been one of the funnest experiences to play with friends during our online game nights.
I do have to say though, many of them have expressed their frustrations with the UI (Ex: can only read space descriptions when it is their turn, slow animations, etc). Are there any plans to try to update the experience to be more user friendly in the future?
Thanks again for all you’ve done to bring this board game to life.”
One of our future tasks for Talisman: Digital Edition is to sit down with our art team and go over what works and what doesn’t with the current UI in the game. We just need to find time between all our different projects to do it! So it’ll happen at some point, we’re just not sure when.
From Arauka
“I’m dreaming the implementation about a specific home-rule we always use in physical Talisman board game : the adding rule is simple but deeply change the way you will play this game, it decrease a lot « chance factor » and gives control to players and add more fun (in our opinion)
The rule:
every player have a 6 card side-deck, the six cards represent each face of the D6 : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
When you, the character you are playing, have to or may to throw a dice, in place of throwing a dice you may decide to use a card of this deck, the card’s value is applied to the dice as throwing result then discarded.
When all cards of this side deck are discarded, at the beginning of your next turn, recover it.
If the game ask the character to roll more than one dice, you can only play one card at once before rolling any dices : 1 - choose to use or not one of your remaining side deck card. 2 – If you play a card, the value is applied to one dice then others are rolled.
Anyway, thank you for all the good work you have done and please forgive my English mistakes (hope what I wrote above make sense)”
This is a house rule we definitely haven’t heard of before, and it sounds super cool! We especially like how it gives you more control over the game. The main issue with this would be the amount of effort it would take to implement from a coding point of view. Which doesn’t mean it won’t happen! It just means that compared to other house rule requests we get that are a simple toggle, this is going to be lower on our priority. Definitely an idea we’ll keep in our back pocket though (and we’ll credit you if we decided to do it!)
From Theo103 (during one of our live streams!)
“As a Dev, what is it like to play your own game? For example, I've heard that actors don't like watching their own movies.”
From Mat, one of our directors: Trouble is, as a dev, you only ever see the flaws in the game (since fixing them is part of the job!) That said, it's essential to play the game 'properly'; I've noticed that if I take a game home and play it in a non-work context, I get a much better feel for what needs fixing and what's working well.
From Rob, another one of our directors: yeah deffo what Mat said - especially with a console game where you're moving from a desktop to a settee
From Michael, the head of our QA team: As a member of QA I don't play any of our games outside of work since I spend so many hours on them already Rather spend my free time playing other games to better separate home and work for my own mental health.
From Stephen, one of our QA team: Yeah I can confirm I do the same as Mike, even sometimes because you're testing games for most of the day that you don't play games much after work. It was nice to play Horizon: Forbidden West as like a customer and not from a tester side of things as opposed to the first game which I didn't really play much cause I tested it and already knew the story/missions and such. 😛
From Kane
“Are there any cool pieces of gaming history in the Nomad office?”
Do some of our own staff count as pieces of gaming history? Mat has worked on a game called Virtuoso, which according to some people is one of the worst video games ever made… he’s got a bit better at this whole video game thing since then!