2nd November 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - OCTOBER EDITION
Hello everyone!
Halloween season has come and gone, and we’re officially in the lead-up to Christmas now! October was a relatively chill month for us here at Nomad, leaving us able to plug away on development for CATAN® - Console Edition. We’ve also had some exciting business updates over the last month, alongside getting into the spirit of Halloween with Fury of Dracula.
Nomad News
Catan Development Updates
Catan continues to be our primary focus here at Nomad, with another month of hard work going into making the game as great as possible!
Audio nearly done
One big thing we’ve learnt over our years of working in digital board games is that being digital means you have access to tools that physical board games just can’t utilise. And one of the biggest tools to help immerse people in the game they’re playing is audio! Whether that be music, audio cues or feedback to the player, audio can help massively when it comes to adding to your experience. And we’ve nearly finished implementing all of the audio into CATAN - Console Edition!
Tutorial work continues
For anyone who follows our monthly updates regularly, you’ll have hopefully noticed that we’ve mentioned our work on the tutorials for CATAN - Console Edition almost every month now for a good while. This is because we’ve learned just how critical a great tutorial is to getting players on board with your digital board game. Which is why in October we’ve continued to pour more hours into perfecting the tutorial for the game, and we’ve still got more we want to do!
AI updates and individualism
Something else we’ve poured hours into over the last few months is the AI for CATAN! Last month we got to the point where we could actually input some of the AI into the game, but now we’ve also began looking at how we’ll have different priorities and desires for the different AI in the game. We’ve still got work to do, but we’re pleased with our progress so far.
Development card flow
When you play your development cards in CATAN, we want to make sure the process is as smooth as possible - which is why we’ve spent some time in October going over the menu flow that you need to go through in order to play your cards.
Achievements and trophies
What game would be complete without achievements to hunt? We’ve been working to implement a list of fun but challenging achievements for you to hunt while you’re playing CATAN, and we hope we’ve struck a good balance!
Reworking the game configuration screen
Want to set up a custom game of CATAN? We know you do! We’ve been working on making the game configuration screen well laid out and easy to navigate, so you can set up custom games super easily and get straight to the action.
Sorting out the Almanac
Want to browse all the different terminology or have a specific rules question? In the physical version of CATAN, you can browse an Almanac that goes over most of the edge-cases and expands upon the core rulebook. We’ve now implemented this in our digital version as well, so you won’t miss out on any of the knowledge contained within.
Controller layout images
Want to know what each of the buttons do while you’re playing? We’ve got you covered with a graphic we’ve made that highlights what each and every button on your controller is used for. We just need to get this in-game now, so you can see it properly!
Breaking (and then fixing) the dice
In October, some of our team came across a weird bug in which the dice would only ever result in either a 1 or a 6. We scratched our heads for a while trying to figure out exactly why this might be the case, until we found out that it was because of the tutorials! In one of the tutorials, we fix your dice rolls so we can demonstrate what happens under certain conditions. This was only meant to happen in the tutorials, but somehow it managed to happen in the rest of the game too. Thankfully it was a pretty easy fix, but it’s a good example of how thorough testing is important before release!
Updating the card playing animation
Just played one of your development cards? Cool! We want to make sure that playing your cards feels as cool as it does in the physical game, so we’ve added some animations that will play whenever you do so. Hopefully it makes it a bit more exciting!
Fury deals and streams
October was a cool month for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition fans! We celebrated the spookiest month of the year with two developer streams last week and the ongoing League of Dracula keeping them entertained. As we head into November, week 1 of the final league gets officially underway, with 8 players battling it out for some exclusive Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition merch. You can find out more about it over on our super cool Discord!
We also ran a special sale for the game on Steam, iOS and Android to celebrate Halloween - so hopefully some new fans were able to sink their fangs into the game for the first time!
Dev kits
Having our team spread out working from home normally works fine, but there are some things where a physical device is needed! We recently got some shiny new dev kits so that our QA team can test out the latest builds of Catan without needing to be in the office.
As we ramp up on testing the game to make sure everything works smoothly and we iron out any bugs as we find them, having easy access to the latest builds at home should help our team massively.
New Nomad team additions
At the start of October, we were very pleased to bring on board a new member of the Nomad team! Dave Griffiths has joined our Unity team, and has already got stuck into CATAN - Digital Edition.
Dave has 20+ years of programming experience, with the last 11 spent using Unity on games, apps and research projects. He was also in a Pink Floyd tribute band a few years back and can make a pretty decent sourdough loaf!
In his own words: “My first month at Nomad has been great and everyone has been really helpful getting me up to speed. Looking forward to helping CATAN get finished.”
We’re super excited to have him on board, and his experience will help make CATAN even better when it launches!
Secret Project updates
While there’s still not a lot we can talk about specifically when it comes to one of our top-secret projects, we can still give out some information so that you at least know what we’ve been doing!
In October, we finished putting together a demo that shows off what we’ve been working on as one of our secret projects. This isn’t something that the general public will ever see (we don’t think!) but instead this is more of a ‘proof of concept’ demo to show to other companies we’re planning on working with.
This is a fairly common practice in the industry, but not something that gets discussed a huge amount! These types of demos are usually bare-bones, as you’re not looking to sell the product itself, but the idea of the project. So while we obviously can’t show you the demo itself, it’s still something cool that we’ve been working on!
Employee handbooks and policies updates
With new people joining the Nomad Games team, we took some time this October to sit down and go through our onboarding process - since lockdown and the major shift to working from home, the way we work has changed drastically. We’ve not changed our staff massively during that time however, so we’ve not had much of a need to take a fresh look at how we bring new staff onto the Nomad team. But now that we’re actively recruiting (check out our Careers page if you’re interested!) we knew it was important to make sure we were up to date.
We want to make sure that everyone who joins our team gets the best welcome they can, even with our new working from home setup. Which is why we’re making sure we put in plenty of time for new starters to meet up physically with members of the team - being able to put a name to a face helps massively. We’ve still got our physical office space, so if people want to come in they are more than welcome to do so (and plenty of the team do!).
We also made sure to get feedback from employment professionals external to us here at Nomad to ensure we’re doing the best we can - and of course we’ll keep listening to feedback from the team on what works and what doesn’t!
Twitch schedule
November being here means that a whole new Twitch schedule is here too! Check out all the times we’ll be streaming below:
And remember, follow us over at twitch.tv/nomad_games to get notified when we go live!
Monthly Mailbag
From Sam
“I don’t know if this has been asked already and sorry if it has but do you guys have any plans for adapting Catan expansions down the line after the base games release such as cities & knights or something like that? Maybe as like a dlc? Thank you!”
This has been asked before, but that’s not a problem! Right now, we’re focusing on just the base game of CATAN because we want to make sure it’s spot on. We’d much rather make a great first impression with players and then be able to justify more DLC, than making a bad first impression and then not be able to work on DLC we’d started.
So for now, we’re only focusing on the base game and can’t share more than that. If you want to make sure you don’t miss any updates, the CATAN - Console Edition website has a newsletter you can sign up for, so the best bet is to do that!
From Alex
“First of all: Congratulations on creating such a beautiful game! You did not simply move it from a board game to an electronic platform but instead even enhanced it by creating a fantastic, highly immersive version! As you might imagine I was a bit sad when I stumbled over this in one of your monthly mailbags:
From JT Holderman
“Any more Mystic Vale expansions coming out for the digital game?!”
Right now we don’t have any plans for more Mystic Vale expansions sadly - if there is enough community demand for more then we’d be happy to take a look.
My question is: How should the community express its demand? Is there some kind of poll, interest list or crowd funding project I missed? If so: Where?
If not: Would you consider something in that direction? I might be mistaken, but I have the impression that interest in digital adaptions of board games is rising?
With best regards and greetings from Germany”
Thank you for the kind words about Mystic Vale! We’ve passed on your praise to the rest of the Nomad team, as it’s always nice to hear appreciation for our work.
And when it comes to expressing community demand, we don’t have a poll or crowd-funding project, instead it’s based on what we see, hear and look for in both the community discussions and in sales of our games/dlc. We keep a close eye on our social media, chatting on forums and other places on the internet to see what people are saying about our games and to get an idea of what demand is like.
We’ve also got hard sales figures that we analyse to see what people are willing to put their money behind, and what they’re not. So while listening to the community isn’t an exact science, it heavily informs the raw data that we get from sales figures.
However, you’re very right - demand for digital board games is indeed rising and the market for it is growing all the time. Instead of taking on a new, riskier project, sometimes coming back and making DLC for an earlier game and injecting new life into it can be the right business decision. Something like a poll or interest list would give us more hard figures and stats to work with, so going down that route would be a great idea.
Leave it with us, and we’ll see what we can come up with to properly gauge interest…
From William
“I've written to you before about this but will do so again in hopes you see sense, look the game is great and all but the card art looks dated!
You can always modernize the art style so nothing is changed, as in a 'different but the same' kind of way. For example, I would like you to see the card style of this Android CCG game: Magic: Puzzle Quest.
The art of these cards is superb, wonderfully drawn and looks very modern, your game would look great with cards that look like that, it would even get new people interested in playing your game as appearance is everything, so please get your art development team to have a look at these cards and update the outdated look of your cards.
Hoping you come to your senses, thank you.”
After checking out Magic: Puzzle Quest, we can very much confirm the art looks great! And you’re right, artwork and how a game looks makes a big impression on new players when they’re deciding what to play.
However, being a digital adaptation of an existing physical board game puts us in a bit of a tight spot, as we need to consider the following things before we update the card art:
As our game is based on an existing game, people with nostalgia for the original will be disappointed to not see that original artwork in the game.
With all the expansions, Talisman: Digital Edition has somewhere over 1,000 individual cards and characters - with only 2 people in our art team, updating all the artwork for the game would be an enormous, impossible task.
If we wanted to outsource the new artwork, we’d of course want to make sure any artists we use are paid fairly - which would cost us a large amount of money.
If we did find a way to create the artwork internally, that would still take away art resources from other parts of the business.
As Magic: Puzzle Quest is based on the Magic: The Gathering trading card game, it can pull a lot of it’s artwork from the physical cards that were already going to be commissioned anyway - it doesn’t cost Wizards of the Coast any further resources or finances to get that artwork. But for a tiny team like us, undertaking a project like this would be much more than we could manage. Hopefully that explains why we’re not planning on updating the artwork!
And that’s the end of this months update and mailbag! Thanks to everyone 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!
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