9th October 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - SEPTEMBER 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone, and welcome to another studio round-up from us here at Nomad Games! Once again, we’re going over all the exciting things that happened to our small studio over the previous month, to give you some insight into what’s happening behind the scenes. Not only that, but we’ve got the biggest monthly mailbag full of questions that we’ve ever had, thanks to all the questions we’ve had from you, our awesome community!
With more reveals for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and development milestones being hit, it’s been another great month for us here at Nomad Games. If you want to find out exactly what’s been great for us, you can read all about it below!
In September, we officially revealed a new feature that will be exclusively available in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - The Deck Editor! If you missed the announcement for it, you can read all about it (and a bonus developer blog too!) right here.
So far, the reception from you all in the community has been great - we know many of you already have wild plans for how you’re going to customise your decks. As we get closer to the release of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’ll be sharing more information about exactly how the Deck Editor will work, and all the plans we have for it post-launch too.
Until then, make sure you wishlist Talisman: Digital 5th Edition if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date with all the latest news, updates and to get notified when it launches!
Because we’re a small team here at Nomad Games, one of the most useful ways our community of Talisman players can help us out is by beta testing our in-development build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
In September, we finally hit the point of development where our NDA’d beta testers could finally get their hands on a build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition we were happy for them to look at. They’re going to be providing feedback, letting us know about any bugs they encounter and generally giving the game a good thrashing ahead of release.
This marks an important milestone for development, as it means we’re confident enough in the game for external testers to be able to play it thoroughly enough to only find smaller/less common issues. Exciting!
As with almost every single month of 2024 so far, we’ve spent a lot of time working on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to make sure it’s the best it can be for you all! September saw our art team putting a ton of work into polishing the game, and our QA team absolutely thrashing through builds to iron out bugs.
Below are some of the highlights from September when it came to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition development:
Deck Editor Implementation
At the very beginning of September, we were able to create a build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition with the new Deck Editor feature. While this early version was still a work in progress, we wanted to have a functional version of the Deck Editor available for testing as soon as we could, as we knew such a complex feature would require far more experimenting with over the course of development than anything else we’d worked on in the past.
Making Sure the Profanity Filter Works
While we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure the Deck Editor offers as much freedom as possible, there are certain things we definitely don’t want you doing with it - especially when it comes to naming your decks. So, we’ve implemented a profanity filter onto the naming system, and in September our QA team had the lovely job of needing to test it.
As you can guess, the filter works as it should!
Active Player Glow
When you’ve got 6 players on a Talisman board, having a visual indicator of who’s turn it is helps out massively to see at a glance who is going to roll the dice next! In September, we added a slight coloured glow to your character when it’s your turn, so you can pick them out on the board quicker. Check it out!
Adding Effects for Cards
There are certain cards in a game of Talisman that are either iconic for the effect they have on the board, or iconic because they have a unique effect. Well, in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’re putting in extra effort to highlight when certain cards come into effect.
All of these effects are going to be fairly subtle, don’t worry! We’re not planning on covering the screen with snow everytime the Blizzard card comes up, but we’ve already found that just a subtle effect makes the game feel much more alive when you’re playing it.
Updating the Splash Screen
You know when you first boot up a game, and you see all the different logos for the companies and studios that worked on it? That’s called a ‘splash screen’, and in September we got around to updating the one in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition! While this isn’t the most exciting development for players, it’s still an important part of making sure all aspects of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition are ready for launch, from the moment you boot up the game!
Making the Intro Video
Speaking of booting up the game, in September we continued working on a fancy animation that’ll play whenever you boot up Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. This will just be a short animation, but it’s another element that adds to the ‘feeling of polish’ that we’re pouring into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition at the moment. We can’t wait to be able to show it off to you properly!
Back in 2023, we released a physical version of Talisman: Digital Edition that you could grab and display proudly on your game shelf - and this year, we’ve done it for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition!
Check out Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition on PS4 over on Amazon.
You can now grab your own copy of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, just in time for your Halloween game nights. Let us know if you grab a copy!
After a good few months where we didn’t get many questions into our Monthly Mailbag, you’ve all come out of the woodwork at once! There are too many of you to thank individually, but from our entire team here at Nomad - thank you for sending in your questions!
From Steve Edwards via Facebook
“How does 5th edition differ from the previous digital game?”
A very good question! First of all, the most obvious difference - this is an adaptation of the 5th Edition of the Talisman board game, whereas the previous digital game was an adaptation of the 4th Edition. As such, all of the changes between those two versions of the physical game are going to be reflected in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
Outside of the board game itself, we’ve completely overhauled everything around the game itself - from rebuilding the engine that Talisman: Digital Edition runs in from scratch, to updating the look and feel of the game in all areas.
From Derek Legault via Facebook
“Is the Timescape expansion a future expansion?”
That’s a question for those cool folk over at Games Workshop, not us! However, we can say that if Timescape did come back in some form in the future, doing a straight 1:1 adaptation of the original 2nd Edition expansion wouldn’t be the way we’d go about it. Talisman has come a long way since Timescape originally released, and we’d need to update the expansion to reflect that.
Ed Browne via Facebook
“Are you planning on doing Alliances expansion?”
Right now we’re just focusing on the base game for 5th Edition before we start looking at 5th Edition expansions. Of course, it’s not going to be a surprise that we’d definitely like to make Alliances digitally, but right now it’s too early for us to say much more than that. Watch this space!
Tokiyo Red via Facebook
“Are you going to have an undo option? So frustrating when a spell I thought I'd queued against someone instantly triggers on me!”
So, this is something that we’ve actually debated quite a bit internally here at Nomad. Over the years that we’ve been working on Talisman: Digital Edition, the request for an ‘Undo Button’ has come up a number of times, and there have always been reasons why we’ve been reluctant to add it, both from a technical and design perspective.
We had this same debate internally during the design process of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. As we were stripping back the Talisman engine to the very basics to start afresh, it was technically possible for us to add an undo button, as we could design the game from the ground up to account for it being an option for players. However, the transition from 4th Edition rules to 5th Edition rules included a wide range of changes to cards in the game, based on feedback from our team here at Nomad. Cards that previously allowed you to target yourself for no benefit (looking at you Immobility) have been updated to no longer allow you to target yourself.
Thanks to these changes, the majority of times where you’d want to use an undo button have now actually been removed from 5th Edition. Once we realised this, we took another look at why we’d want to add an undo button, and decided that we’d rather focus our attention on other aspects of the game to improve the experience for everyone.
From Hubert Jatkowski via Facebook
“Not a question, but I have another suggestion for a quality-of-life improvement for 5th edition: table descriptions. Players could use it to state general rules of conduct at their table so they don't have to type them over and over again when someone new joins.”
We’ve passed this suggestion onto the rest of the Nomad Team, and we’ve discussed it a fair bit internally. While we’re not sure we’d be able to implement something like this for launch (because we’d need to make sure you can’t name your table something you definitely shouldn’t be able to), it’s still a great idea.
From Nelson Pearson via Facebook
“Hello, Will the new Deck Editor allow us to upload custom art for cards?”
Sadly not, we won’t allow you to upload custom art for cards for a number of reasons - the main one being that there’s no way for us to check the kind of artwork you’d be using for your cards. Copyrighted, age-restricted and AI generated artwork would have the ability to be shown to anyone, screenshotted in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and shared online. We’d certainly like to be able to offer something like this, but it just opens up too many possibilities for abuse.
From suraimuman via Twitter
“Japanese please.”
This isn’t so much a question as a request, and this request has been received!
From Scott Adams via email
“Warhammer 40,000 relic board game. I know there is a physical version of this game. But it would be awesome to make a 3D digital version on PC. You already have Talisman which is very much like it. Plus people love the Warhammer universe. Add DLCs that you can make more money on. I would even love working on the project since I am a computer programmer. But I know Nomad has the rights and is more of a moderate programmer. I believe you guys could do an amazing job. Please make it happen.”
This is something that we’ve had requested a number of times now! We certainly would have a head-start thanks to our Talisman experience, but for now we’re going to keep focusing on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. Rather than bite off more than we can chew. It’s good to know we’re being thought of for an adaptation though!
Eric Davis via email
“I've been seeing lots of information about expansions and plans and future plans for digital edition of Talisman 5th edition, but I haven't seen anything about, are these expansions and plans going to also be eventually released for the physical Talisman 5th edition board game also? Thank you!”
While we do have some insights into the plans for Talisman: 5th Edition physically due to our relationship with those lovely folk over at Games Workshop and Avalon Hill, there isn’t anything we can share about those plans. The whole reason we have those insights to begin with is because we’re trusted by Games Workshop and Avalon Hill to not share information we shouldn’t. So until they say anything, we’re not saying anything. 👀
From Ollie Murray via email
“Hi y'all! Hope development is doing well. I'm so curious about the music for Talisman 5th Edition. Who is the composer(s)? Is Mattias Westlund coming back to compose for 5th edition?”
We’re going to talk about the music behind Talisman: Digital 5th Edition at some point in the future, when we can go into detail on what we’ve done! But for now we can say that Mattias Westlund isn’t returning to compose for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
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!
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