2nd July 2024

NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - JUNE 2024 EDITION

Hello everyone!

June was another exciting month for us here at Nomad games, with tons of development happening on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, summer sales and much more. We’ve also finally hit summer weather here in the UK, which means we can finally open the windows in our collective home offices.

Thankfully (for you!) we’ve taken a break from sticking our heads out of the window, to bring you another monthly studio round-up, covered all the exciting things that have happened to our small games studio over the last month!

Before we officially announced Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we were secretly working on it for a good number of months behind the scenes! We’re still a while away from release, but we didn’t want that to stop us from showing you what we’ve been working on already.

That’s why at the end of June/beginning of July, we published our first every Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blog, giving you a look behind-the-scenes at what we’ve been working on so far for the game. Give it a read here!

So far, a ton of you have already told us how much you appreciate getting a look at the game even in these rough early stages. We think showing you Talisman: Digital 5th Edition this early helps us a ton, because we can keep a close eye on your feedback (thanks for that, by the way!) to inform how we’ll continue working on the game.

While our first developer blog gave a good overview of what we’ve been working on over the last few months, we’ve also made some great strides with Talisman: Digital 5th Edition just over the last month!

We’ve put together some of the highlights from development in June below, so take a look:

Added Fancier Looking Text

Between all the text on cards, characters and the board itself, Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is going to have a lot of text in it. We’re talking a lot of text. And one of the things we’ve learned over the last 10 years since we originally launched Talisman: Digital Edition is that using bold text and italicised text is a super easy way to convey important information, and draw attention to parts of text that we want players to be aware of.

Up until June, we only had one type of text in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition that we used for everything - but not anymore! We can now add bold text and italicised text wherever we think it’s needed. We hope that this will improve readability of the game, speed up the experience for seasoned players and help newer players better understand the information that is important to remember.

Fixing up the Board Space Text

While we’d been working away on other aspects of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we finally hit the point where our QA team could begin taking a look at the game, figuring out anything that needed fixing. One of the first things they pointed out was that a lot of the text we’d used on the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition board was still placeholder, and we’d never actually got around to updating it.

Sometimes a pair of fresh eyes can notice something that the rest of us have glossed over from seeing so much!

Work on Online Play

While we’re saving a full deep-dive into how online play in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition will work for a future developer blog, we can share that in June we spent a good amount of time looking at how we’re going to handle the online side of the game. Stay tuned for more when we can share more!

Adding Text to ‘My Collection’

If you’ve checked out the developer blog we put out for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition (which you totally should!), you’ll know we’ve made great progress on getting all the new cards implemented into the game. However, one of the things we didn’t have implemented before June was visible card text on the ‘My Collection’ page! We only needed this text for internal testing, so right now it’s not the nicest looking thing in the world. But it works for what we need!

Fixing Crashes

Like we mentioned above, our QA team started actively taking a look at Talisman: Digital 5th Edition recently, which means that they’re handing over crash reports to our development team! Thanks to us stripping back the Talisman engine, fixes for these crashes are massively easier to figure out, so we’re squashing them nice and early!

Tutorial Planning and Testing

We spent a good amount of June planning out how we’re going to handle tutorials in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. One of the things we’ve learned massively over the past 10 years of people playing Talisman: Digital Edition is how much people can bounce off their first Talisman experience if it isn’t clear what they should/shouldn’t be doing. So we’re putting in the work to make the first time Talisman experience as good as it can be!

Adding Card Flairs and Flourishes

We’re making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition look as cool, modern and shiny as we can - and we’ve started adding some special flairs and effects to different adventure cards. These cool effects aren’t quite finished polishing up yet, but once they are, you can bet we’ll be showing them off!

Back in May, we made Talisman: Digital Edition free on PC and mobile - you can find out more about that here!

When we made that original announcement, we mentioned that we were looking at what to do with the console versions of Talisman: Digital Edition. You see, because of how we originally set up the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation versions of Talisman: Digital Edition, the base game comes bundled with some expansions.

Therefore, if we made the base game on those platforms free, those bundled expansions would also have to be made free. After some internal discussion, we decided the best course of action for consoles was to lower the price of the base game to just cover the bundled expansions - so while the game isn’t free, you’re only paying for the bundled expansions.

If you want to find out more, you can read the full blog post here!

A very cool milestone was reached in June, thanks to us making Talisman: Digital Edition free on Steam - over 250,000 of you grabbed the game to add to your Steam library!

Not only that, but the number of active players on Steam shot up following the game being made free, and has stayed higher than it was before the announcement too!

While we knew that we’d get a bunch of new players into Talisman: Digital Edition once the game was made free, we weren’t expecting THIS many! Thankfully, we had already increased our server capacity prior to going free, and so far it seems like online play is running as we’d expect.

There’s not much else to say, except thanks for picking up Talisman: Digital Edition!

At the end June, the Summer Sales officially kicked off! With deals across Steam, GOG, mobile and consoles, there’s never been a better time to not go outside.

Many of these sales are still going to be available until July 11th, so check out the highlights here!

The Immortal Update might have rolled out for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition, but we’re not finished yet! In June, we rolled out the 5.2.0 patch onto Steam, which featured even more fixes, improvements and updates to everyone’s favourite Dracula-punching-simulator.

You can read the full patch notes over on Steam.

And in other Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition news, the latest community-ran tournament just finished up - with the Immortal Invitational finishing with plenty of dramatic games, exciting new strategies and adaptation to the new, updated version of the game. Check out the results below!

In June, the Talisman Complete Collection Returns bundle concluded, with over 12,000 bundles being sold and over £10,000 being raised for charity! If you picked up the bundle while it was live, thanks a ton for not only supporting us, but for supporting charity too.

Even though it’d be easy to overlook it, we thought it was still worth pointing out that Mystic Vale on Android got an update last month!

Previously, Mystic Vale was having issues running on Android versions 12, 13 and 14. As we hadn’t touched the game for so long, we’d not had chance to figure out exactly why it wasn’t running on those versions of Android.

Thankfully, a slot in our schedule opened up in June (partly due to us taking a break from Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition updates) which meant we could work on and roll out a fix - which we’ve already heard has fixed issues people were having! Success!

Due to the way our studio and teams are organised here at Nomad Games, we sometimes have to put part of a project on hold while other members of the team work on things. For example, if our art team are working on the design for a whole system of menus, new assets or something else that can’t be put into the game until they’re finished, our developers have to wait until that’s done.

While the majority of the time we can pivot to another part of the game we’re working on, sometimes that isn’t always the case! So when this happens, we take the time to either look at projects we haven’t had chance to touch for a while, or we’ll brush up on skills we don’t get to flex that often!

Due to shifting priorities and needing to wait on certain things being approved, some of our developers had the time to go through courses on C++, brushing up their skills to make the games they work on even better. Nice!

As we expected, we got a ton of questions this month all about one particular topic, so we’ve rolled a lot of them into a single answer! ‘Monthly Mailbag Questions’ channel to our Discord, which you can find here!

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 now we made Talisman: The Horus Heresy.

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!

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!