3rd November 2023
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - OCTOBER 2023 EDITION
Hello everyone, and boo!
Apologies for scaring you all, but we ARE just finished celebrating Halloween by the time you’re reading this. Once you’ve calmed back down after that frightful experience, we’ve got another fresh monthly studio round-up for you to sink your fangs into. October has marked yet more awesome milestones for us as a studio, and has got us excited for the future of Nomad Games!
What’s not got us so excited is the rapidly dropping temperatures and dark nights here in the UK - for the team working at home, it’s meant that we’ve had to turn our heating up and work with the lights on to combat the early nights. But we’re powering through it!
The biggest news to come out of October was that the Nintendo Switch version of CATAN® - Console Edition finally got a release date! That’s right, on November 9th it’ll hit the eShop (and you can preorder it right now!).
We’ve been working very hard behind the scenes to make the Switch version the best it can be, and can’t to hear what people think once they get their hands on it. We’ve been playing it on our developer kits and it feels great to play it on a portable system. Check out the official trailer below to find out more:
You can also find out more about the Nintendo Switch release of CATAN - Console Edition over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website!
Autumn arrived in style this October, as the Reap & Sow pack was released for CATAN - Console Edition. Featuring new characters, a whole new look for the game and much more, check out the official trailer for this content pack below:
Us and the awesome folk over at Dovetail Games put in a ton of effort to make sure that we made players feel as Halloween-y as possible, with plenty of pumpkins, scarecrows and the most terrifying Robber you’ve ever seen. You can find a full list of everything included in the Reap & Sow pack over on the official CATAN - Console Edition website.
As you can tell already, October was another busy month for the CATAN - Console Edition team here at Nomad! Alongside releasing Reap & Sow and getting ready to launch on Nintendo Switch, we also released a patch for the game on October 5th (check out the patch notes here!). The community response to the patch has been highly positive, so thank you to everyone who let us know what they thought about it over on the CATAN - Console Edition Discord!
As we’ve already talked about what’s coming up, let’s go over everything that happened behind-the-scenes with CATAN - Console Edition development, highlighting some of the most exciting milestones!
Lots of Great QA Work
With DLC releasing at the start of the month and releasing on a whole new platform at the start of November, our hard-working QA team here at Nomad have been doing everything they can to test the game as thoroughly as they can. Alongside the equally awesome team of QA staff over at Dovetail Games, we’ve been making sure any bugs we come across get raised and investigated as soon as they can be. Everyone involved with testing CATAN - Console Edition has gone above and beyond this October, and we want to make sure they get the recognition they deserve!
Ice & Snow Testing
With the Reap & Sow content pack released, we’re turning our eyes towards the second content pack that is in the works! We’ve already made great progress with this winter content pack, and in October we reached a point where we could begin testing it to make sure everything works as it should. So far, everything seems to be running smoothly and we’re on track to bring a winter wonderland to the game for you all. Watch this space!
Information Display Updates
In October, we made some important decisions on how we display information to the player while they’re playing CATAN - Console Edition. In the Cities & Knights expansion, we realised that it’s very important for players to be able to see at a glance what their current knight strength is without having to go into a menu etc. to find it. We’ve also added some new graphical flourishes to certain buttons and information to better highlight what the player needs to focus on at different points of the game. We’re hoping this making playing a game and keeping track of all your important information and decisions much easier!
Rulings, Questions and Clarifications
As we’re going through the Cities & Knights expansion and making sure everything works as expected, we’re making sure we account for each and every possible interaction that the game might throw at a player. Even if it only happens once in every 200 games, we need to make sure that the rules work exactly as they should when it does happen! In October, we chatted a lot with the lovely folk over at CATAN studio, who were very patient as we bombarded them with the most technical rules questions that they’d had in a long time.
Knight and Barbarian Pathing
As part of the Cities & Knights expansion, we’re going to have the Knights wandering around the island of CATAN during the game! The Barbarian ships will also sail across the sea as you play, and you’ll be able to see them move as they get closer and closer. In October, we ironed out some issues that both the Knights and Barbarians were having with getting from A to B smoothly - and now they know exactly where they’re going!
AI Testing and Updating for New Features
With the addition of the Cities & Knights expansion, the number of options and considerations that the AI in CATAN - Console Edition needs to make each turn has increased dramatically! With all these new tools at their disposal, we’ve worked hard to make sure that the AI still makes smart decisions and puts up a good fight against human opponents. We’ve been running games where we leave the AI to its devices to play for as long as it can, and then if it gets stuck, we can figure out where it got stuck and then iron out those sticking points one-by-one. There’s still more work to do in order to make the AI as we’d like it to be in the final release, but we’re going to keep testing, improving and updating the AI until it shines!
And that’s the development highlights for October! But don’t forget, you can keep up with all the latest CATAN - Console Edition news by following the game on social media. Cities & Knights is coming along well, so make sure you stay tuned for more updates!
In October, Tom (our Marketing man who manages both our social media channels AND this very Round-Up you’re reading!) went away on holiday to sunny Greece for a week! As he was away, we needed to make sure our Twitter and Facebook were left in the most capable hands we had.
Sadly, all the capable hands were busy. So we left them in the hands of a Talisman toad instead. Check out some of the ‘highlights’ below:
To celebrate Halloween in style, we added some brand-new avatars to Talisman: Digital Edition for people to deck their profiles out with. From pumpkins to ghouls, you can now make your Nomad Account as spooky as you’ve always wanted.
Just don’t blame us when your friends are too scared to play with you!
In more Talisman: Digital Edition news, we’re currently working on another patch for the game that’ll continue to improve the game. Keep an eye on the Steam update page for more news.
As usual, we’re back to talk more about the project that we can’t talk about properly yet! October saw even more progress being made on our upcoming secret project, with new builds being tested and rolled out internally that include fancy new features that we still can’t talk about.
In news that’ll make us all happy, we’re hoping that in November we’ll finally be able to announce what we’re working on. We’re still not 100% on that just yet - we’ve still got a lot of things to iron out and a lot of big decisions to make behind the scenes.
Who knows, the next round-up you ready from us might be the one that finally spills all the details! We sure do hope so, because keeping it secret for so long is wrecking havoc on our collective nerves.
We got some good questions this month in our studio mailbag, so thank you to everyone who sent something in!
From PenilessImp749 via Twitter
Is there ever going to be Talisman: Digital Edition Remastered, with 3d or Overhauled UI and engine? Love this game to bits, but the UI/engine is very outdated and not very keyboard/controller friendly in my opinion. Maybe even Quest VR version? Digital Board games are fun!
A very good question! Right now, we’re mostly happy with the state that Talisman: Digital Edition is in. With the game quickly approaching 10 years of being updated, fixed and built upon, we can agree that it’s starting to show it’s age a bit. We’ve done our best to keep it looking fresh, but we’ll acknowledge that some elements (controller support is a good example) aren’t as good as they could be.
However, a complete overhaul of the game from the ground up is a big undertaking! For those who remember, we had to wait years until we could dedicate the time needed to update the PS4 version of the game (find out more here). Realistically, we’d need something to happen that would justify us spending that amount of development time on a new version of Talisman: Digital Edition. If a 5th Edition of the game was launched physically, for example!
From highsman13 via Twitter
For board game adaptations, do the companies with the license making the physical versions approach you to create a digital one, or is it the other way around?
It’s actually a mixture of both! We’ve been approached and done the approaching, and we’ve got a ton of contacts in both the digital and physical games industries who have done the same.
Oftentimes, a physical publisher will contact a number of different digital game studios to see who would currently be open for a new adaptation project. We’ve had licence holders approach us previously with a license, and we’ve then forwarded them onto other studios that we’ve worked with in the past because we’ve already been at capacity. Passing on these opportunities to other studios is a great way to make sure that we raise each other up as games studios, and helps people keep us in mind next time they get an opportunity they think we’d be a good fit for!
When it comes to us approaching license holders, this tends to happen whenever we’re thinking about the project we want to next take on. If we currently don’t have anything lined up, we’ll ask around to see if anyone has a license that would be a good fit for a digital adaptation. Usually there are plenty to choose from, but it depends on who holds the rights and how popular the game is!
From Highlander4Ever via email
What is your policy with regards to copyright strikes of Talisman DE gameplay videos on social media? When it comes to the Talisman RNG, my group knows me very well that I use math about rolls:
-For Coin Toss loss (i.e. rolls of 1-3) they hear me go "50%. 25%. 13%. 7%. 4%. 2%. 1%. 1 in 200. 1 in 400! 1 in 800!! 1 in 1,600!!! etc..."
-For rolling a 1 they hear me go "1 in 6. 1 in 36. 1 in 216. 1 in 1200! 1 in 7,200!! 1 in 42,000!!! etc..."
NOTE = When I have crazy good rolls, I've been known to Ditch all of my cards for others to pick up and go "Eh. That streak of 6s made me feel dirty. RNG screwed you guys. I forfeit!" A video channel would either prove the RNG conspiracy theorists wrong, or at least partially right. This also assumes my group will go along with it if you give the green light. Please let me know what your policy on gameplay videos is.
Either way, despite some frustrating streaks of rolls, thank you for your great game.
If you want to record and upload a video of any of our games (and put them anywhere online) you 100% can do. We’ll never have an issue with you doing that, so go ahead!
If you do end up uploading any videos, please make sure to send them our way via any of our social media channels - we’d love to see how you demonstrate your secret roll maths. Oh, and thanks for the kind words about Talisman: Digital Edition too!
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!