9th August 2024

NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JULY 2024 EDITION

Hello everyone, and welcome to another studio round-up!

As we passed the middle of the year here at Nomad Games, it’s felt very much like we’re in a state of transition. We’re gearing up for the release of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, our priorities are shifting based on timelines we’re plotting out for the rest of the year, and we’re taking stock of our future plans and goals.

We’ll have more to share about all that exciting future stuff soon enough, but for now we’re taking another look back at all the exciting things we’ve done as a game development studio over the past month instead.

So, as always, let’s get into it!

Enjoyed our first developer blog for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition when we published it in June? Good! Because we’re going to keep them coming your way, covering all the exciting work that is happening behind-the-scenes on the upcoming game.

In July, we published our Rules and Gameplay Developer Blog, where we went in-depth on how transitioning from the 4th Edition Talisman ruleset to the new 5th Edition rules posed an interesting challenge for our team.

If you haven’t already, give it a read here!

Are our Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blogs not enough for you? Well, you’re in luck, because we’ve been working on it throughout all of July, and now we’re going to tell you what we’ve been doing, by going through the highlights:

To Face the Crown or Not

In July, we had to decide what direction to face characters once they reached the Crown of Command. While this is a relatively minor note in our development process for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, it’s one that is worth noting as it demonstrates something new we’d never had to consider before!

You see, Talisman: Digital 5th Edition features fully 3D modelled characters, just like you’d find in the physical board game. However, this now means we need to account for the direction of those 3D models! After a small amount of debate as to whether characters should face ‘forward’ or look towards the crown, we decided that seeing the front of the character was better!

Making More Icons

As we’re now fleshing out the different menus that you’ll encounter while playing Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’re slowly adding new, shiny icons to represent these choices. While we had icons for Talisman: Digital Edition we could use as placeholders for final assets, we’re now far enough into development that we can make new icons that match the new look that we’re making for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

Maxing Out The Characters

Part of developing a game is pushing things to the limit to see the outcome - if you can prepare to handle the most extreme situations that the game is going to be pushed to, then you know that it won’t break before it reaches those.

All of that is to explain why in July, we filled an entire Talisman board with Trolls to see what would happen:

Turns out, the character figures start to overlap! So, we’re going to be looking at ways to dynamically shrink figures depending on the situation, to avoid overlapping occurring. And that’s why it’s important to push these things as much as you can!

Creating Warlock Cards

Just like in previous versions of Talisman, in 5th Edition the Warlock is one of the most consistent ways of earning a titular Talisman. For anyone who’s not played Talisman before (or needs a reminder!), you roll a die when you arrive at his cave, and depending on the result he will give you one of six possible quests.

In the physical game, players are expected to make note of the quest they have and when they complete it. In the digital version however, we want to make sure that we’re not relying on player memory to keep track of their quest - especially when you can save your game and come back to it later.

In order to display this information, we wanted to use cards that the player could reference - but no such thing exists in the physical board game. So, we did the next best thing, and made our own cards. We’ve still got to finalise exactly how they’ll look, but once they’re finished we’ll make sure to show them off to you!

Online Testing

Our QA team have been working hard throughout July testing online multiplayer in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, now that we’ve got a basic version of it running! It might seem that we’re testing this feature early into development, but with changes being made to the game at such a rapid pace, it’s super important that we routinely ensure that what we’re doing tracks onto all the different game modes we offer, and doesn’t cause any conflicts later down the line.

In July, we smashed through an awesome milestone for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - we’ve now had over 30,000 of you wishlist the game on Steam!

If you didn’t already know, wishlists are super important to developers on Steam for a wide range of reasons. It means the game gets pushed up the charts, we can gauge initial interest and tell prospective publishers how much interest there is!

We massively appreciate that you’ve all shown just how excited you are for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and wanted to take the time to acknowledge that.

In July, we sent out a player feedback survey, to learn more about what you all thought about Talisman: Digital Edition, Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and much more!

Before we closed it at the end of July, over 400 of you had given us your thoughts, feedback and opinions directly to us, and we massively appreciate that. We’ve got a ton of information to go over now, and we’ll be sharing the most interesting findings with you all too. All of that information will help us when it comes to design and business decision-making for both Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and Talisman: Digital Edition.

We’ll be going over the results in due course, so stay tuned for a deep-dive into them!

Thought we were done with Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition after we dropped The Immortal Update earlier this year? Well, you’d be wrong!

In July, we released The Revenant Update for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition onto Steam, Android and iOS. The headline feature of this update is that we’ve added the ability to quit and resume online games at a later time. We hope that this new feature will help people who've wanted to play Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition online but haven't had the chance due to time constraints or issues with scheduling. This update also included a number of other fixes and changes, which you can check out in the full Steam patch notes here.

So far the community response to this update has been very positive, which is always great for our team to hear!

Not only did Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition get a fresh update in July, it also starred in an equally fresh bundle thanks to our friends over at Fanatical!

As part of their annual BundleFest event, Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition is available as part of their ‘Build Your Own Card and Tabletop Bundle’, which you can find here! We’re proud to have Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition be part of this bundle alongside a bunch of other awesome digital tabletop games, so make sure to check it out before the offer ends!

This July, Develop returned to the sunny shores of Brighton here in the UK, and an entire swarm of game developers descended upon the highlight of the UK Games Industry events calendar.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Develop is an industry event here in the UK where developers from all over the country (and some from outside the UK too!) come together to speak, network and give out industry awards! We managed to talk to a lot of other industry professionals about the current state of the games industry, our plans for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and other exciting projects.

If we managed to meet you while we were there, it was great to see you! If we didn’t manage to catch up with you, just know that we still think you’re cool.

Over the last two months, the amount of questions we’ve been getting sent into our monthly mailbag has been slowly declining, which makes us sad! So this month, we’re going to be asking you a question!

For some context, we asked an important question in our Talisman player survey when we sent it out: “What community events/developer interactions would you like to see before/after we launch Talisman: Digital 5th Edition?”

The most popular response to that question in the survey was “Developer Q&A sessions”, so we’re absolutely going to be incorporating them into our Talisman: Digital 5th Edition promotion plan - so we want to know how you’d like us to do these Developer Q&A sessions. Would you like to have us host them on Discord? Or do a live stream and answer questions? Or how about we pre-record a video of us answering questions you’ve sent in? We want to know what you’d like to see.

Oh, and we’ve got two mailbag questions over the last 2 months!

From Jordan Paul via Twitter

“I know with Talisman 5th edition coming out, probably aren’t any plans. But do you all have plans to make any more IP Talisman games (ie, Kingdom Hearts, Harry Potter)? I’d love to see a Marvel, ATLA, or LOTR versions!”

Right now, we’re fully committed to making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition the best it can be - we definitely don’t want to bite off more than we can chew before then.

Once we’ve released Talisman: Digital 5th Edition though? Well, you’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?

From a Scott Cray via Facebook

Why no Relic?

You mean why haven’t we made a digital version of a game that combines Warhammer and Talisman? Well, we’ve got some good news and bad news for you.

The good news is that many years ago we published Talisman: The Horus Heresy, a game that did combine Warhammer and Talisman. The bad news is that our license to sell/publish Talisman: The Horus Heresy expired and it got removed from all storefronts. You can find out more about that here.

So when it comes to Relic, we’d definitely like to take a crack at making Relic: Digital Edition, don’t get us wrong. But our experience with Talisman: The Horus Heresy not setting the world on fire with sales has meant that we’re reluctant to dive back in, as we’re unsure of the size of audience it would have - and that’s the honest truth!

Hope that answers your question!

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!

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