1st December 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - NOVEMBER EDITION
Hello everyone!
November has come and gone, and we’re officially in Christmas season! As the temperatures get colder and the nights get darker, we’re making sure to keep our home offices as warm as we can as we carry on working away on CATAN® - Console Edition.
A lot of the Nomad team take extended holidays around Christmas, so we want to make sure that everything is prepared and sorted before we leave. Which means a lot of work to get done, but nothing we can’t handle!
So without further ado, let’s go over all the cool stuff we got up to as a games studio in November.
Nomad News
Catan Development Updates
As you should all expect by now, we spent most of our time continuing the development of CATAN - Console Edition!
AI Improvements and feedback
Now that we have the AI up and running in CATAN - Console Edition, we can start putting it to the test! Members of the Nomad, Dovetail and CATAN teams have all been putting the AI through it’s paces and feeding back to our development team on what needs adjusting and/or changing. It’s very much an iterative process, but we’re getting there!
Signing out mid-game
What happens to a game when you log out of your Xbox profile in the middle of a game? We can’t imagine this is something people think about (because it doesn’t happen a lot!) but as a developer, this is something we need to ensure CATAN - Console Edition can handle happening.
Second screen instructions
As many of you will know, we’ve been working hard to add the ability for players to use their phones as a second screen to keep their hands secret as they play. We’re still working hard on making your second screen experience the best it can be, and part of that is just letting people know how it works! To that end, we’ve put in some information on the game setup screen that explains exactly how the second screen feature works.
First time player experience
Something we’ve learned over our many years of making digital board games is just how important nailing that first-player experience is. If people bounce off your game before they get a chance to properly see everything it has to offer, getting them back is almost impossible. Which is why we’re working extra hard to get people on board properly!
Studio logos
There have been a lot of cool people involved with making CATAN - Console Edition, and we want to make sure everyone gets the recognition they deserve! So we’ve been making sure that all the studio logos that appear when you start the game are properly displayed and inputted correctly.
Localised text size issues
One of the issues we’ve come across time and time again while making digital board games is text size! While it’s easy enough to make sure that English text fits, other languages can take up a ton more room. So now that we’ve had our translated text back, we can start going through the game and fixing the places where it doesn’t quite fit.
Friend invites
Being able to invite your friends to play CATAN with you is important, right? That’s why we’ve been working hard to make sure inviting your friends is as smooth as possible! Between the Nomad QA team and the lovely folk at Dovetail, we’ve been sending friend invites back and forth more than the early days of the Xbox 360. Progress!
Our QA teams rise to the challenge
With our development team focusing so much on polishing up the game and ironing out bugs, we’ve been leaning heavily on the great work of both the Nomad and Dovetail QA teams to ensure all possible issues are getting raised.
Thanks to the good communication between our two teams, we’re extremely proud to report that our QA teams are absolutely smashing it so far. With each new build of the game, they’re checking to see if existing bugs have been removed and reporting anything that still needs fixing.
So while this doesn’t really fit the criteria of an ‘update’ on what we’re doing here at Nomad, we still wanted to take the time to shout about the great work that’s happening behind the scenes! We’re very aware that in the games industry, QA often gets the short end of the stick - but you literally wouldn’t be able to look forward to CATAN - Console Edition without them!
Also, this is our news round up, so we decide what counts as an update!
Talisman + Lockdown Bundle
As one of the oldest games studios in the digital tabletop space, we’re always looking out for ways we can help younger studios get their feet in the door! Which is why we’ve teamed up with the cool folk over at Awaken Realms Digital to offer the Lockdown and Talisman bundle over on Steam!
You can check out the bundle here.
Not only that, but we’ll also be streaming Nemesis: Lockdown over on our official Twitch later this month… keep reading to find out more!
Stream Schedule
We’re in December now, which means it’s time to reveal our streaming schedule for the month! We’ve already shown this off on our social media channels, as our very first stream for December is happening when we post this round up!
So if you’re reading this on December 1st, make sure you follow twitch.tv/nomad_games to get notified when we go live later today! And if you’re reading this in the future, follow us anyway so you don’t miss our Nemesis: Lockdown and extra Talisman: Digital Edition streams.
And if you’re reading this in the future-future of 2023, howdy!
Monthly Mailbag
From Gabriel
“How did Nomad go about getting the license for CATAN? Do you approach people or do people approach you?
A good question, and it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B! Given how much history we have in the games industry, we’ve got a ton of friends and contacts across the entire industry.
As massive as the video game (and board game) industries are these days, it’s still a very small community where a lot of people know each other. So while we were working on Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition, we were still talking to other people in the industry and keeping an eye out for cool projects. With our experience and track record, our name gets passed around quite a bit whenever people discuss potentially bringing a board game to life digitally. It was through discussions like this that we go approached about making CATAN - Console Edition… and the rest is history!
From Greg
“Starfarers of Catan - Any chance we will ever see this game on PC or iPad? Thanks!”
That’s a good question, and one that we’re sadly ill-equipped to answer! As far as we’re aware, there aren’t any plans to make a digital version of Starfarers of CATAN anytime soon. We could be wrong though!
But we imagine if a digital adaptation did release, PC and iPad would be safe bets. For your sake, hopefully someone ends up doing it!
And that’s the end of this months update and mailbag! Thanks to everyone (I’m talking to you, Gabriel and Greg) who sent in questions, and don’t forget to send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk if you want us to answer your burning questions next month!
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!