4th October 2022
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - SEPTEMBER EDITION
Hello everyone!
September came and went, and we’re officially in the spookiest month of the year! So expect lots of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition playing on our weekly streams, and more spooky fun throughout all of October. But we’re not here to talk about the future… we’re here to look back on everything we’ve been doing and answer some community questions!
This month, we’re going to go over all the cool things we got up to as a games studio in September, including some Catan updates, our first ever companion app and more. Exciting!
Nomad News
Catan Development Updates
Another month goes by, and we’ve been plugging away at Catan more furiously than ever! Some highlights of what we’ve been working on in September includes:
Game settings UI
Want to change something about Catan before you embark on another adventure? You’ll need a settings menu to do that! We’ve now created the menus that you’ll browse whenever you change the settings, both during a game and when you’re on the main menu screen.
Results UI
Something we did for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition and are bringing back for Catan is a results screen, where we show you all the exciting stats about who did what, who scored the highest in different areas and who earned the most bragging rights.
AI functionality
We’ve recently completed a massive document that goes over what we expect the AI to do in different scenarios during a game of Catan, alongside a super complicated list of priorities we expect the AI to keep in mind whenever it needs to make a choice. We’re now beginning the long and arduous process of inputting that information into the game, after which we’ll begin the even longer process of testing how the AI performs under different conditions and if it does what we’re hoping it will do. Once it’s all finished though, we’re hoping that we can make something that’ll put even an experienced Catan player through their paces.
Tutorials functionally complete
While we’ve still got some work to do on getting the tutorials for Catan exactly how we want them, we’ve now at least got them into a position where you can play through them from start to finish without any issues. They still need some work to get them exactly how they should be in the final release, but being able to play through them entirely means we can test the whole tutorial process and ensure it flows properly no matter what the player does - so it’s down to our talented QA team to try their best to break it so we know what to fix!
Ready Set Bet Launch
At the very end of September (the 30th, to be exact!) we released the official companion app for Ready Set Bet, the latest board game from our good friends over at AEG. Check out the full announcement here! This is the first time we’ve ever made a companion app, so we had a whole host of new things to learn that we’d never done before in all our years of digital board game development. Needing to account for a physical game that would be working outside of the app at all times meant we had to think very differently about how we displayed information and what we expected players to be able to see at different times.
This was also our first ever project where it featured full voice acting through the announcer - you can take a look behind the scenes at what practicing their lines was like for our announcers in this great video from AEG.
The physical game and our app are both available now, and so far the reception seems to be positive! We’re definitely pleased with the result and excited to try our hand at more companion apps in the future. So if you know a board game that needs a companion app, send ‘em our way!
If you want to find out more about Ready Set Bet, check out the official AEG website.
Talisman patch update
At the start of September, we released a patch for Talisman: Digital Edition onto Steam, iOS, Android and Nintendo Switch. This included a ton of bug fixes and improvements to the game (many of which were either reported or requested by the community!).
You can read the full patch notes over on the Steam announcement page.
October stream schedule
After a lighter stream schedule in September, we’re back in full force this October with streams each week over on our official Twitch channel! We’re doubling down on Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition, playing a spooky-themed Talisman: Digital Edition game and trying out Gloom as our “digital board game made by someone else” pick of the month!
Follow us on Twitch now and get notified when we go live, so you won’t miss out on any of our key giveaways, community challenges and fun times!
We’ll also be giving out Steam keys for our games during these streams, so come along if you want to be in with a chance of winning!
Monthly Mailbag
Last month we put out a call for community questions, and some of you were nice enough to send a question in!
From LoneSylvan
“Talisman must be your most successful game (please correct me if I'm wrong) but things have gone very quiet with it recently. I was waiting for your August newsletter to check, but it does seem that you are now focused on new projects.
Please can you assure us that Talisman is not going to be abandoned?
While I understand you are a small team, and that Talisman is quite an old release, plus a pretty complex game, if it is to remain successful it still needs work put into it. I see many threads on Steam about 'bugs' which are not really 'bugs' as such, but rules/cards/characters not working as they should do in certain situations. I also encounter these myself while playing and some have become notorious among regular players. Plus there are also many issues with the AI. I was interested in 'Dracula' when I first heard about the release, but have not even bothered to purchase it due to what I have read about the AI being so bad as to basically make it an online only experience. Making better/challenging AI for these games is important. Another question, on a lighter 'Talisman' note: What made you change the Satyr's ability to 'startle' rather than 'panic' ? (which was the name of that ability in the 1st/2nd edition board game version). The most famous Satyr is called Pan for a reason!”
No need to be corrected, Talisman is indeed our most successful game as a games studio! We are indeed focused on other projects at the moment (both Catan and another secret project) that are pulling all our resources in. While bug fixing and providing updates for Talisman: Digital Edition is something we know people will appreciate, it’s hard to justify spending the time and resources on it exclusively when we’ve got so much on our plates already - so thanks for appreciating that.
But we’re definitely not planning on abandoning Talisman anytime soon, at least in terms of bug fixes and updates. Like you said, Talisman is a complex game - keeping on top of all the different interactions between different cards and effects is a very delicate balancing act. We’re also well aware that the Talisman AI has room for improvements, and when we can roll out an update, we try to address some of the loudest concerns that get raised by the community.
With regards to the Satyr’s ability, we believe it was because the original Panic ability forced other characters to move away from where they were, which isn’t a very unique ability, so we thought that making them drop an object was a bit more 'tricksy', in line with Satyrs of legend.
From Stormer
When are we finally going to see Catan? Feel like you’ve been working on it forever now.
Soon, we promise! We’re aware that people have been waiting for a good while to see what Catan will look like, but we’ve wanted to wait until we can make the best first impression possible. It’ll be worth the wait, we promise!
From Dan
“Are you going to be doing more companion apps? And how long does a companion app take compared to a digital adaptation?”
We don’t have anything in the pipeline right now, but if someone approached us about doing one we’d definitely be open to the idea! And it was a shorter process to make the Ready Set Bet companion app than other games we’ve made in the past, but it was a fairly simple app compared to something like Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition for example.
And that’s it for another monthly round up! Thanks as always for the support you give us, we massively appreciate it - we wouldn’t be able to keep making fun games and look after all our staff if it wasn’t for you all.
If you’d like to continue keeping up with all the latest news and updates from us here at Nomad, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. You can also check us out on Twitch every Thursday, sign up to our email newsletter or hang out on our official Discord!