9th October 2023
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - SEPTEMBER 2023 EDITION
Hello everyone!
September has come and gone, and we’re officially in the spookiest month of the year! But before we bust out the pumpkins, we’re here to once again look back on everything we accomplished as a studio in the previous month.
Not only does looking back help us share our latest studio news with you, but it also means we can celebrate and reflect on what we’ve achieved too. Often times, we’ve got our collective noses to the grindstone and forget to appreciate just how much we’re achieving on a regular basis. And we’re achieving a lot!
So let’s get into it, by looking back on everything we did as a studio in September:
September was another solid month for ongoing CATAN® - Console Edition development, as we continue working towards both the release of Cities & Knights and the Nintendo Switch version of the game.
The key things we worked on in September included:
Flip chart progress
Anyone who’s played Cities & Knights before will be able to tell you that city improvements are one of the key considerations for anyone wanting to achieve victory. Well, we’ve now implemented the development flip chart from the expansion, so you can improve your trade, politics and science as you see fit. We also spent time looking at how best to display your progress through your upgrades, and we’re happy with what we’ve achieved so far.
Preparing to battle barbarians
Another key part of the Cities & Knights Expansion is the introduction of Barbarians! We’ve already made some great progress with implementing them into the game, and in September we continued that good work. Alongside figuring out how best to display information about incoming barbarian attacks, we worked more on ensuring your choices when the barbarians do arrive are clear to the player.
Switch builds being built
While we’re working on Cities & Knights, we’ve not forgotten about the Nintendo Switch port! We continued to work on the Switch version in September, improving the frame rate and doing further testing to ensure everything runs as it should. Progress! We now have a fully working version of the game, but we still have a lot of testing and smoothing out to do before we’re fully happy with it.
Figuring out new User Interfaces and menus
When we’re adding new cards, mechanics and choices for players to make during a game, we sometimes need to make new menus and popups to allow you to choose options that you’ve never had to choose before. Each menu starts with a design from our art team, based on specifications from our design team - that design then gets handed over to our programmers to implement. So in September, we started implementing some of those new menus!
Updating animations
Not only are we putting in new menus for certain Cities & Knights cards, we’re also putting in some snazzy new animations to help draw your attention to important information as you play. So not only do these animations add some life to the game, they’re quite useful from a design/user experience point of view too.
Asking for rules clarifications
Just like with the base game, we’re making sure that we implement all of the rules for Cities & Knights perfectly. In order to do that, we’ve been combing through the rulebook to make sure we account for all edge-cases and interactions. When anything has been ambiguous, the awesome folk over at CATAN studio have been on hand to help us clear up the rules.
And that’s the highlights for September! 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!
September was a very exciting month for our big super secret project - both in terms of ongoing development updates and our plans for release!
Through September, our development team worked on:
Bug fixes! While this project is still a while away from release, we’re bug fixing as we go, as it means that we don’t come across issues later in development that are caused by those bugs. Tidy code is nice code to work with!
Now when you click outside of the game onto another program, it will pause. Handy when you need to quicky reply to a Discord message and don’t want to let the game keep running!
Fixing a bottleneck in performance that meant that a big chunk of GPU memory was being taken up unnecessarily, and causing major slowdown when trying to demo the game on some of our older machines. We went from 10 FPS to 30!
A ton of other stuff that’s very cool, but might give away what we’re working on… so trust us when we say it’s cool!
Alongside all this exciting development work, we’ve also been having lots of internal discussions about how exactly we’re going to go about publishing this game. We can’t wait to properly talk about it, so please continue to watch this space!
In September, the Talisman: Digital Edition - 40th Anniversary Collection was properly announced! You can read the full blog post here.
We’re excited for people to get their hands on it when it launches, and hope you enjoy having a celebrating of 40 years of Talisman sitting all shiny and fancy on your game shelves!
In September we did two live streams of Talisman: Digital Edition! One was to celebrate being part of the daily deal on Steam, and the other was just because we wanted to do it!
Don’t forget that you can follow our official Twitch channel to get notified every time we go live!
In September, we ran a daily deal over on Steam - a big thanks to our friends over at Valve for letting us do so! The sale is now over, but we massively appreciate everyone who picked up either Talisman: Digital Edition, some DLC or any of our other games!
Your support means we can carry on making cool games and doing what we do.
And finally, we rolled out an update for the Ready Set Bet companion app that added German language support to the app! Hopefully this means that even more people can experience the thrills of playing the board game with our official companion app.
We didn’t get any questions in the mailbag this month, so instead the Nomad team have questions for all of you!
From Anonymous via email
Would publishing the snippet(s) of code using the RNG prove to people concerned about fairness that the game doesn't cheat? (Possibly not, since they could claim that you're publishing 'fake code.') What about writing (or linking to) articles on how PRNGs work and how humans are bad at judging randomness. But, of course, you can't make people read any of it, so the complaints will keep coming.
I find all this 'the game cheats so I keep losing' whinging immensely tedious, and I imagine it's much more frustrating for you guys.
On the other hand, we know the AI is perhaps not as 'intelligent' as it could be, but that's a separate topic :-)
While publishing some of the code we use to generate dice rolls in Talisman: Digital Edition is something we’ve discussed and debated internally in the past, we know that even if we did so, people would indeed either not read it (like you’ve pointed out) or claim that we’re not posting the ‘real’ code used to generate dice rolls.
For us, we’ve accepted that there are certain people that we can’t convince that the dice rolls aren’t ‘rigged’, and we’re okay with that - our attention is instead going to making sure that we combat any misinformation that those people might spread. Even if we can’t convince players, there are a ton of players who can be convinced either way. The last thing we want is for those players to see those discussions and think “the developers aren’t here defending the game, so this MUST be true!”.
And while it can be frustrating to have to have the same debate over and over, we know that it’s worth it to make sure that players can see that we’re actively engaging in debate with those players and showing that not only do we support the game, but that we’re an open and honest studio.
We’re also definitely aware that the AI can use some improvement - that’s something we’re always working on!
From Raistlin
Do you have any information if any more Smash up expansions will be available on steam?! I would like to purchase them all!
A good question, but sadly we won’t be able to give you the answer you’ll be hoping for! We’ve released a few expansion decks for Smash Up, but the amount of development time it takes to make them is quite large compared to the amount of revenue they generate. So sadly it ends up actively costing us money to develop and release new expansions for Smash Up, which is why we haven’t released anything for it for a long time.
If we one day come back to Smash Up (thanks to a console release etc.) and it does well, then that’d mean we can make more expansions! So if you want to see more Smash Up stuff, keep letting us know - one of the ways we decide what’s worth porting/developing for is due to community feedback too.
From @Milejakub on Twitter
Is there a way to turn off the card limit in Talisman? I see it's locked at 500. Also, are the cards picked at random if there are 500+?
So the good news is that there isn’t actually a card limit! It’s just that once you’re playing with enough expansions to go over 500 cards in the adventure deck, we just label it 500+ for the sake of simplicity. So in reality, your adventure deck has more than 500 cards in it - we just don’t think it’s necessary to tell you exactly how many because at that point, there isn’t really a benefit of doing so.
And yes, the cards are indeed picked at random even when there are that many in the deck. Unlike the real game, shuffling an adventure deck full of 500+ IS possible when you leave it to a computer.
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!