7th July 2023

NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JUNE 2023 EDITION

Hello everyone!

Another month has gone, and we’re now officially in summer! That means rising temperatures, longer days and summer sales aplenty. It also means another month has gone by with exciting things happening here at Nomad Games, so we’re going to go over everything exciting that happened in our studio through June.

From CATAN® - Console Edition to Secret Projects (🤫). there’s a lot to cover - so let’s dive straight in!

We finished June (and started July) with some big reveals for the future of CATAN - Console Edition! First up was the reveal of The Helpers expansion and the Season Pass for the game, which are both launching on June 20th:

With two new expansions coming out and three seasonal content packs to expand your CATAN experience with, there’s a lot of coolness on the horizon! The Helpers will be the first addition to the base game, so we can’t wait to see what you all think of it. And while you can purchase it on it’s own, you can also pick it up as part of the Season Pass, which includes the Reap & Sow, Ice & Snow, Bloom & Grow content packs and the big expansion you’ve all been waiting for - Cities and Knights! You can find out more about this exciting new content over on the CATAN - Console Edition website.

For new players looking to get their hands on as much CATAN as possible, we’re also going to be launching the Super Deluxe Edition of the game, which will contain the core game of CATAN – Console Edition, The Helpers expansion and Championship Maps.

On top of all of that, the second roadmap for the game also got revealed, which covers all our current plans for the game and what we’re going to be working on over the next few months. Check out the video below that goes into full detail on what you can expect!

And don’t forget, you can keep up with all the latest CATAN - Console Edition news by following the game on social media.

Back in April, the first official roadmap for CATAN - Console Edition was announced, and it included a whole host of exciting new content and features that would be coming to the game!

We’ve already released the turn timer update, and as you can see from the reveals above, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to get CATAN - The Helpers ready to release too!

Last month, our work on CATAN included (but wasn’t limited to!):

Sorting out icons for Nintendo Switch

• As we work on the Nintendo Switch port of CATAN - Console Edition, one of the changes that we need to make is re-doing all the different tool-tips in the game! So on the Nintendo Switch development build of the game, we’ve gone through and made sure all the places where Xbox or PlayStation button prompts pop up have been replaced by those lovely Nintendo icons.

Implementing and testing all the different Helpers

• For anyone who’s never played CATAN - The Helpers, you can find out more about how this expansion works here! In June, we spent more time developing this expansion, from making sure all the different helpers were implemented correctly to figuring out how we would display all the new information that these characters bring to the game, to the player.

Checking in with CATAN Studio

• As we continue working on bringing new content to CATAN - Console Edition, we’ve been regularly checking in with the rules experts over at CATAN Studio to make sure all the edge-cases are covered. The Helpers can do some wild things during a game, so we want to make sure they always act consistently! Some of the questions we asked even got the CATAN studio team scratching their heads, which we take as a compliment. We’ve learned through years of working on digital board games that accounting for the edge cases might not need to be done with a physical game, you absolutely have to when making it digital. You can’t ask a computer to house rule something on the fly!

Working on more future content

• Alongside working on CATAN - The Helpers, we’ve also been setting the groundwork for even more future content that we’re going to be bringing to the game. The roadmap has already confirmed that we’re working on a big expansion for the game, which we’re currently developing (but can’t talk about just yet!) During June, we spent time setting more of the groundwork for this future content, so that we can ensure that we don’t end up coding ourselves into a corner. Future us will be thankful, we’re sure!

Setting up Helpers on storefronts

• Making new content for a game is all well and good, but people need to be able to find it too! Last month, we were finally far along enough in development to be able to upload working versions of the Helpers expansions onto the different console platforms. This meant we could tick off all the boxes needed to get our store listings up.

Shifting around menus

• With new content comes new things to choose and customise! Being able to customise your experience based on your currently downloaded expansions/content needed a new menu, so we’ve moved some things around to make it easy to navigate.

QA team crushing bugs

• As usual, our hard-working QA team have been pushing each new build of the game to the limit, working out what’s causing errors and where bugs are arising. They’ve also been testing the early Nintendo Switch version, as a new platform brings the possibility for a whole host of new challenges and unexpected reactions to previously bug-free elements. The team have also been testing the new content we’ve been working on, to ensure that the purchase process etc. goes smoothly and everything downloads properly. Busy!

Not only does summer arriving mean it’s time to bust out the sun cream, it also means that the annual summer sales have also kicked off!

Across Nintendo Switch, PC and mobile, we’ve got a whole host of awesome deals for you to get stuck into. You can find the best offers in our Summer Sale Blog Post.

Every month, it’s getting harder and harder to not talk about all the cool stuff we’re currently doing! We’ve spent a lot of time in June working on our super secret projects, had a ton of meetings with publishers and other cool people to show off what we’ve working on.

First, our team (and especially our hard-working new hires) have been diving deep into Unreal to make a working prototype of a game we can’t wait to show off to you all. The rest of the Nomad team are regularly downloading builds of this prototype to try out and give feedback on, and so far the work that our team have managed to do has been very impressive.

We’re also having lots of external discussions with publishers to see what projects we can get our hands on next. So far all our discussions have been very positive, so we’re hopeful we’ll have something to announce soon.

At the start of the month, we released a patch for Talisman: Digital Edition onto all platforms! This included a number of different fixes, improvements and more (including many either reported or suggested by our community. You can read those patch notes here.

After releasing that patch, we had a number of users report that they couldn’t open the game anymore - after some very helpful reports from users on the Steam forums, we are able to figure out the issue. It turned out, something that we had changed to make the game run better on PlayStation 4/5 had caused the game to stop working on Windows 7 PCs. Game development is weird.

Later in June, we released a follow-up patch that fixed the game not working on Windows 7, and since then we’ve been keeping a close eye on reports of other issues - so far there doesn’t seem to be anything major to report!

From denali1890 (via Instagram)

How many of your team are looking forward to the Starfield launch and, of those, how many are going to get the Constellation Edition?

We got a ton of responses to this, so we’ve put them below with their associated team member!

Ethan: “I'm not sure I would want to play it because I just didn't have much fun with other open world RPG games made by Bethesda's game studio. Open to being surprised though. Some of the features from the showcase looked cool (even if it did take like 10+ minutes up of the showcase)”

Dave: “Tentative yes but keeping my expectations low.. i struggled to really get into Fallout 4 but will be giving it a try when it comes out.”

Michael: “Not even looked into it to be honest, there have been other game's that have caught my eye that interest me more. Plus I'm trying to avoid open world games at the moment, not that I don't enjoy them it's just a few of the games I played recently have been open world and I want a break from that model.”

Duane: “I don't have time for massively open world games these days so it's a no from me.”

Stephen: “Not really personally. From seeing the gameplay, for a space game I do find the color palette to be pretty dull/boring. No need to get the Constellation Edition when you can get it on Game Pass anyway which I'll likely check it out through that”

Carl: “I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm sure it'll be in a bit of a mess for the first few months, but like Stephen said, it'll be on Gamepass so I'll check it out that way.”

We hope that answers your question!

From Don V Anderson Jr. (via Facebook)

#1 What was the hardest card to program in the Talisman game?

#2 What was the hardest game play element to program into the Talisman game?

BONUS what was the hardest bug fix in Talisman?

Our Talisman development expert Jethro answered this one for you:

“#1 hardest invididual card : Characters.. maybe shapeshifter? (sort of - a big rework happened where we separated all of the abilities from characters, which then really enabled us to make it) if it was a card.. probably tapestry rewoven (this actually required a rework in order to make it work) but some of the destinies were complicated too, e.g. letting the game know you can use dark fate as light fate

#2 first thing that came to mind was dark fate, but probably something more like controller support if that counts as a gameplay element?

#3 the arena bug was the longest standing elusive bug I think? Can't even remember what it was, but it took us years to reproduce it/fix it.”

Mike, our QA manager also gave some of his own insight into the mythical ‘Arena Bug’:

I pretty much spent a whole day with that card trying to reproduce the crash people said they were having with it. Then, I think it was either the next day or a few days later I encountered a random crash somewhere else in the game, but I got told later that the fix for the crash also fixed the arena one

Pretty much why I call bugs that the community encounter but we can't repro, despite following every detail given, arena bugs.

From Honey Warham (via Twitter)

Is the timescape expansion a possible future release?

A question we get a lot! For anyone who doesn’t know, Talisman: Timescape was an expansion released for the 2nd Edition of the game. It looked a little something like this:

It was also a big fan-favourite, and because of it’s unique style it has stuck in the mind of many older Talisman players. So we get asked this question a lot!

Sadly, the return of Timescape to Talisman is highly unlikely. When this expansion originally released, the idea of crossing over the Warhammer license with Talisman was something that our good friends at Games Workshop were happy to do. However, nowadays the Warhammer depicted in Timescape looks vastly different from how it does today. In order to make the expansion work with the current version of Talisman, it would have to be changed so much that fans of the original wouldn’t be happy, and Talisman fans would be left wondering why this sci-fi themed expansion doesn’t fit with all the existing ones.

Hope that gives some insight!

From Hashi (via Twitter)

Hows your day going?

Ethan, one of our awesome engineers stepped in to answer this one: “Pretty well since my office isn't an oven like it was a week or so ago”.

Thanks for asking!

From The Rabbit Hole (via Twitter)

How's war of the ring the digital version coming and do you need help?

Unfortunately, we’ve decided to rate limit the monthly mailbag, so we can’t give you a full answer on this. However, what we can say is that-

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!