2nd August 2023

NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JULY 2023 EDITION

Hello everyone!

We’re more than halfway through 2023 now, and we’ve had another exciting month here at Nomad Games. With the launch of our first expansion for CATAN™ - Console Edition and even more work happening behind the scenes, there’s never been a better time to be invested in the ongoing work of a small games studio specialising in digital board games. We’ve got updates and insights into the last month to share with you, so let’s get to it!

Before we get started though, a small update for you as an appetiser - we now have an official Threads account! We’re still figuring out how we want to use it/how we should use it, but in the meantime you can follow us here.

 

On July 20th, we launched The Helpers for CATAN - Console Edition! Our first expansion for the game, it adds 12 new characters who use their specialised skills to help you develop and build better than ever before. So far the response from you all has been positive, and we’re glad to see you’ve all been enjoying adding some extra fun to your CATAN sessions.

You can find out more about this exciting new expansion (and the even more exciting Season Pass) over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website.

If you’d rather see the Helpers in action, the awesome Benjamin (Senior Community Manager at Dovetail Games, Captain Beard on the CATAN - Console Edition Discord and generally amazing human) gave it a go in July. Give his playthrough a watch below:

 
 

And don’t forget, you can keep up with all the latest CATAN - Console Edition news by following the game on social media. The Helpers is only the beginning of future content for the game, so it’s well worth making sure you stay in the loop!

 

Another month goes by, and we’ve another big batch of CATAN - Console Edition development updates to share with you! With an expansion releasing and new content on the horizon, that was our main focus in July - but there’s other exciting stuff for us to share, including Nintendo Switch updates!

Some of the development work we did in July includes:

Patches and Updates

  • As part of releasing all this exciting new content for CATAN - Console Edition, we rolled out a patch for all platforms that included a number of improvements and updates to the game - check out the full notes at the bottom of the announcement blog here.

Cities and Knights Design Doc

  • As you’ll have seen from the Season Pass announcement, we’re officially working on bringing the Cities and Knights Expansion to the game too! As part of the development process, we’re putting together a comprehensive design document for our digital version of the expansion. We’ve started work on it now, and it’s coming along nicely!

Cities and Knights Task Assignment

  • Not only are we making a start on the design process for Cities and Knights, but we’re also starting to assign tasks related to developing it to members of the team. Don’t get much more “we’re officially working on it” than that!

Switch Online Testing

  • Now that we’ve got a build of CATAN - Console Edition running on Switch (although there’s still a lot of work to go before it’s release ready!), we can start work on the elements that will be entirely different compared to the Xbox and PlayStation versions. First up, how online play works! We’re currently doing tons of testing to make sure that things run smoothly online when playing on Switch, and making good progress so far.

Switch UI Work

  • With the Nintendo Switch being a handheld device that you can hook up to your TV, we need to take screen size into account in a way that we didn’t have to think about when developing for Xbox and PlayStation. We’re playing tons of game in handheld mode and our art team are working to resize and re-do the user interface so that you’ll be able to properly see everything you need to while playing and nothing goes off-screen! As you can see from the screen on an early Nintendo Switch developer build below, resizing is important!

 
 

Switch Store Setup

  • Of course, the back-end systems for Nintendo work entirely differently to the other consoles. Making sure that all your expansion purchases, player username etc. are being pulled from the right places requires some work on our side. Thankfully, we’ve got quite a few Nintendo Switch titles under our developer belt at this point, so we know where we should be pointing and pulling information from!

Art Work for Seasonal Content

  • In case you forgot, the Season Pass for CATAN - Console Edition includes three seasonal content packs that include a whole host of cool (or warm, depending on the season!) content to customise your CATAN experience with. Our art team are already hard at work on this new content, and we can’t wait for you to see it when we can share it!

 

While we can talk freely about the exciting work we’re doing on CATAN, don’t let that fool you - we’re also working on a ton of cool stuff that we can’t talk about!

In July, we continued working on a playable demo version of our big upcoming secret project, implementing more gameplay mechanics and polishing up what we’d already put into the demo. The biggest milestone we hit was that our QA team could finally take a good crack at playing the demo to figure out exactly what was working and what wasn’t.

Of course, being a very early prototype means that there’s still a lot that looks placeholder. While the final design is up in the air, there isn’t much use in designing a nice looking user interface

Another secret thing we can sort of talk about is an upcoming physical release for one of our games! We’ve been busy working behind the scenes to get everything together you need to release a game into the real world, and it takes quite a bit of work! When we’re ready to fully announce exactly what we’ll be putting on store shelves, we will do - but watch this space!

 

In July, we discounted our titles across a whole load of different platforms to celebrate the summer season. We also hosted a developer stream where Tom (the person who writes these round ups!) tried his best to not get turned into a toad.

You can check out the full stream below:

 
 
 

For those who don’t know, every summer there is a conference here in the UK for game developers to get together, have talks and network with each other. Some of the Nomad Games team were there too, and we managed to bump into a ton of familiar faces over the days we were in attendance.

Not only did we get a chance to show off what we’ve been working on behind the scenes, we also talked to a number of publishers and other studios about what they’re excited for in the coming months and years.

Oh, and we also had some great snacks while we were there. Turns out, Brighton has a lot of good snacks.

 

Recently, the Ready Set Bet on Android had some issues where it wouldn’t work on certain devices. In June and July, we spend some of our development time trying to work alongside those lovely folk over at Google to figure out exactly what was happening to stop it working.

In the middle of July, we finally managed to figure it out and get the companion app up and running again for players on Android devices. It took us a while, but we’re very pleased to hear that players can once again play with the app. The races are back on!

From ¡¡Milej!! (via Twitter)

Are we getting any more digital-exclusive characters for Talisman?

A good question! Right now, that depends very much on what we want to do in the future with Talisman: Digital Edition. Between making more cool stuff for CATAN - Console Edition and working on our secret projects, we have been extremely busy as a studio for most of 2023.

If we can spare the time to look at more cool Talisman stuff (and we decide that the best thing to make is more characters) then yes! However, we need to make sure that we balance out our workload. So the answer right now is… maybe!

From Greg (via emailing questions@nomadgames.co.uk)

Any chance we will ever see a digital version of Starfarers of Catan? I think many players would love to play that!

Hi again Greg! Just like the other two times you’ve asked us about this, our answer still hinges on the same main points that need to line up:

  • Dovetail want to make Starfarers of Catan digitally.

  • CATAN Studio want to make a digital version of Starfarers.

  • We can see that there is enough of an audience there for the game to justify making it.

Not only do those things still need to happen, but our teams here at Nomad and at Dovetail also need to have the free time to dedicate towards making it! Hopefully that answers your question (or at least gives you some insight) into the chances of seeing a digital version of Starfarers. If and when those stars align (get it?) we’ll be very excited to tell everyone.

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!

 
Thomas Young