23rd September 2024

TALISMAN: DIGITAL 5th EDITION - DECK EDITOR ANNOUNCEMENT AND DEVELOPER BLOG

Hi Talisman fans!

We’re excited to announce one of the exciting new features we’re bringing to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - the Deck Editor! The ability to customise the decks you play with in a game of Talisman is something that the community has requested for a long time, and we’re super excited to finally confirm that you’ll be able to do so in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

With the Deck Editor, you’ll be able to fully customise the experience you can expect in each game of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition you play, and use your custom decks with your friends too! Want to make the only spell available be the ‘Random’ spell? How about filling the deck with extra Dragons to up the danger? However you want to play, you’ve got the ability to make your game, your way.

If you can’t wait to try out the Deck Editor, don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam to get notified as soon as it goes on sale!

Check out some of the in-development screenshots below to get a first-look at how the Deck Editor feature is coming along so far:

Given that this is a brand-new feature with a lot to discuss, we figured it would make sense to tag on a developer blog to this announcement too, to talk through how we went about adding this feature!

History of the Deck Editor

Over the years that we’ve worked on Talisman: Digital Edition prior to making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’d occasionally see requests on the Steam forum that’d we’d classify internally as “This would be fixed if we had a Deck Editor”. Whether it was people complaining about specific cards, or wanting more control over what they could draw, we knew that giving people the ability to edit their decks would go a long way with many players.

In fact, at one point many years ago, we tried to get a very basic version of the Deck Editor that you’ll see in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition working in Talisman: Digital Edition. Unfortunately, at the point where we tried to do this, even a basic version would cause Talisman: Digital Edition to break, as the game wasn’t designed to support adjusting the cards that were available. And due to the way we’d programmed the expansions in Talisman: Digital Edition, trying to get some cards to work without relying on others was causing a butterfly effect of bugs and issues.

So, when we got confirmation that we were making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we knew that stripping back our Talisman engine to be bare bones would mean that we could build it back up with support for the Deck Editor in mind, and here we are!

Designing a Deck Editor for the First Time

Because we’d never implemented a feature like the Deck Editor in any of our games before, we didn’t have a frame of reference in any of our earlier titles to use as a framework. So, we sat down and looked at what other in-game deck editors offered, and what players did when customising the decks for their physical copies of Talisman too.

Thankfully, two things worked in our favour when it came to research:

• Digital deck-builders have seen a massive boom over the last few years.

• People have been customising, tweaking and messing with their physical copies of Talisman since the 80s.

So, we had a ton of reference points for what players expect from a digital board/card game, and what Talisman players specifically would want in a Deck Editor. We learned that players appreciated a simple way to browse through their options over anything else, card filters and the ability to label their decks clearly.

We also knew we didn’t want anything overly complex, that would put off all but the most dedicated of players. We think our current design for the Deck Editor in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition strikes a great balance between allowing tons of customisation, and not being too granular for the average player.

Deciding the Limitations of the Deck Editor

Once we knew that we were going to allow players to customise their decks before their game began, we were presented with two different scenarios we had to consider:

• What would happen if a player made an ‘unwinnable’ custom deck?

• What would happen if someone had a bad experience because of a custom deck?

Initially, we planned on setting limitations on how you could construct each deck to ensure that a game still ran smoothly (e.g. had the right ratio of creatures, strangers and followers). Our thinking was that if someone plays their first game of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and has a bad experience because they’re using a custom deck that makes the game unplayable/unfun, then they’ll be put off the game. We’ve seen enough people have bad luck during their first games and never return to Talisman: Digital Edition to know that it can happen!

After much internal (and external!) discussion, we decided that we’d only stipulate one restriction on deck building in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - your Adventure Deck must contain at least one Talisman.

Our reason for this decision is based on the fact that in order to play a game with an unwinnable custom deck, you have to be the one who makes it in the first place. If a player wants to go out of their own way to set that up, should we stop them? Maybe. But what if stopping them means putting restrictions on the other 99% of players who won’t accidentally create a deck that is unwinnable? Well, in that case, it seems unfair to punish those players for what someone might do. Also, because Talisman as a board game has so many moving parts, trying to define what kind of adventure deck would ‘work’ in a game was an absolutely headache-inducing task.

So you heard it here first - we’re trusting you with the responsibility of making sure your Talisman: Digital 5th Edition decks work. And if they don’t, that’s on you!

Deck Editing the Reaper

In case you (somehow) missed it, we announced recently that we’re bringing your classic expansions from Talisman: Digital Edition over into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, for free. You can check out the full announcement here.

We can confirm that once The Reaper Expansion launches in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, you’ll also be able to fully customise which cards from the expansion get included when you enable it. Only want certain cards from the expansion to get shuffled in with the existing base game spells and adventure cards, for example? You can do that!

As we add more Expansions (and therefore more decks) to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, you’ll be able to customise their decks too - we can’t wait to see what kind of wild combinations of cards you’ll all come up with in the future!

Testing the Deck Editor

Because the Deck Editor allows for such a wide range of possible combinations of cards in a game of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, it presented an all-new challenge for our QA team - how do you test all the ways a player could put together a deck?

Going through every single possible combination of cards and testing it was out of the question - with billions of combinations, we’d be testing the Deck Editor until 3024!

So instead, our QA team has been focusing on specific interactions that we know would cause issues because we’ve never had to account for them before. For example, in a normal game of Talisman, you wouldn’t be able to use two Runeswords in a fight, because there’s only ever one in the game. But with custom decks, it can now happen, which means we need to make sure the game can handle that!

We’ve also been testing the online functionality of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and custom decks at the same time, so that we can make sure that any bugs caused by either of them get noticed at the same time!

Scoping Properly for Launch

Through the entire process of making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’ve approached it with the mindset that we’re going to be supporting, building upon and updating it for as long (if not longer!) that we did for the 10 years that we did for Talisman: Digital Edition.

This mindset also applies to the Deck Editor. When we listed out all of the cool things that we’d be able to let you do with it, we realised that the Deck Editor is the kind of feature we could iterate on, build upon and update with all sorts of new options and features. Instead of trying to squeeze all these features into it at launch though, we’re focusing on making the base experience the best it can be, and going up from there.

We also knew that focusing on the core features of the Deck Editor for launch was the smarter decision both for us as a studio, and for you all as players. Keeping it simple means that we can add it to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition much earlier, and get feedback from you on what works and what needs improving - and you get to play with it sooner too! So while it might seem that the Deck Editor is fairly basic at launch, that’s because we want to make sure that the basics are completely nailed down and work perfectly, before we start building on them.

We’ll share more about how we’re planning on expanding the Deck Editor in the future, but rest assured that we’re going to be adding to it as the years go on!

Naming and Thumbnailing

When we were designing the Deck Editor, we also made sure to think about the features that would be needed ‘around’ the Deck Editor to make it useful to players too. We knew that players wouldn’t want to just make one deck, for example, which is why we designed the deck browsing menu. 

Not only will you be able to rename your decks to better keep track of them, you can also use any card art you like from the game to set a custom thumbnail for each deck, allowing you to see at a glance which one you’ve filled with massive dragons, and which one is your ‘fun, make all your friends suffer through the RNG’ deck.

And that’s the end of our latest Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blog! We hope you’ve enjoyed this early look at the Deck Editor, and can’t wait to show you more of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition as development progresses.

To keep up with everything Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all the places we are online!

And don’t forget to wishlist Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to get notified when it launches!

And you’d like to find out more about Talisman: 5th Edition, you can do so by going here!