Talisman: Digital 5th Edition News

Hi Talisman fans! ːBlueTalismanː

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!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

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!

[h3]History of the Deck Editor[/h3]
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!

[h3]Designing a Deck Editor for the First Time[/h3]
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.

[h3]Deciding the Limitations of the Deck Editor[/h3]
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!

[h3]Deck Editing the Reaper[/h3]
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!

[h3]Testing the Deck Editor[/h3]
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!

[h3]Scoping Properly for Launch[/h3]
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!

[h3]Naming and Thumbnailing[/h3]
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!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

Hi Talisman fans! ːBlueTalismanː

It’s now been an entire two months since we officially announced Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to you all, and the support you’ve all shown us has been overwhelming, to say the least!

We recently hit the milestone of 30,000 wishlists for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition here on Steam, which is awesome! For anyone who doesn’t know, the amount of wishlists that you have directly impacts the kind of places that you show up on the Steam store (and how cool Valve think you are, but that’s harder to quantify).

Of course, we want to keep this good momentum going, so if you’ve not already wishlisted, make sure to do so! Not only does it help us out, but you’ll get notified when Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is available for purchase - handy!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

If you’ve already wishlisted the game and are looking to stay up to date with the latest news, developer blogs and reveals from our small studio, you can follow us in all the places we are online!

If you’d specifically like to talk about how excited you are with other Talisman fans, you can join our official Discord.

Hi Talisman fans!

After our last developer blog, we’re back to talk even more about Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, which you can wishlist now over on Steam!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

This time, we’re going to be going through how we’ve handled all the rules changes and updates from the 4th Edition of Talisman to the 5th Edition. To give you a peek behind the curtain, we actually had access to the Talisman: 5th Edition rulebook long before it was officially announced, so we’ve had a good amount of time to figure out how we’d handle all these changes and new rules.

Not only did we have early access to the rulebook for 5th Edition, but we’ve also been working closely with the designers at Avalon Hill to ensure our implementation of the 5th Edition rules is an exact, 1:1 recreation of what you can expect in the physical game. We’ve had regular contact with them to go over edge-cases, odd-interactions and much more - they’ve been incredibly (incredibly!) patient as we’ve pushed their each and every 5th Edition rules interaction to the absolute limit. But it’s thanks to that great relationship we’ve got with them that we’re confident that Talisman: Digital 5th Edition will be a fully faithful adaptation of the board game.

In this developer blog, we’re going to go through some specific examples of rules and gameplay changes between the 4th and 5th Editions of Talisman, how we’ve handled those changes and what that process was like - so let’s get to it!

[h2]The Talisman symbol on the dice[/h2]

While this isn’t a rules change, it’s still something we needed to keep in mind, and is a good example of a change that would be easy to overlook if you weren’t paying attention! If you’re lucky enough to already own a copy of Talisman 5th Edition, you’ll have noticed that the dice look a little different than they did in 4th Edition.



For those of you who aren’t in the know, the 5th Edition dice feature a Talisman symbol to represent ‘6’. After more than 10 years of seeing a single dot represent the ‘1’ on a dice, it took some getting used to for our team to recognise this new 6 roll at a glance!

[h2]Character Updates[/h2]

Did you know that in Talisman: Digital Edition, when you add up all the expansion characters and the extra characters from their respective character packs, you end up with more than 100 characters to choose from? It’s true! Originally, we programmed each character in Talisman: Digital Edition individually, but some years ago we changed how characters were defined by the game - we made each of them modular, which allowed us to easily swap in-and-out different abilities. This means that instead of programming each character from scratch, we can start with a modular template and add abilities to that - which proved massively useful when making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

You see, alongside getting a fresh new look, many of the iconic starting characters have had their abilities adjusted or stats changed to rebalance them for 5th Edition. So, we compiled a big list of all those changes, and went through each one to make sure they aligned properly with their 5th Edition versions.



Thanks to the modular nature of characters in our Talisman engine, swapping out abilities and adjusting Craft/Strength values was made much easier than it would have been otherwise, and testing them took much less time too.

[h2]Death and the Returning[/h2]

In 4th Edition, when you were killed, your character returned to their Starting Location, and rejoined the game in the same state as if they’d just started. One of the reasons we made The Realm of Souls expansion is specifically because the harshness of death in Talisman was such a big point of contention in the game.

Now, when your character is killed, they are placed on the Village space and keep all of their items. You then have to spend your next turn buying as many lives as you can for 1 gold each (up to your characters starting life value).

This is quite the big change, but making it so that all characters follow the same rules when it comes to death actually helps to streamline the dying process quite a bit! And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that dying needs streamlining.

[h2]Updating how fate lets you move[/h2]

In the 4th Edition of Talisman, you could spend fate to reroll whenever you got a die result you didn’t like, as long as you had fate to spend. This remains true in 5th Edition, but now the rules for how you move around the board after spending fate have been changed. Specifically, In 5th Edition, after rolling your movement die, you may pay 1 fate token to ignore the roll result and instead move your figure up to six spaces in either direction to a space unoccupied by another character.

Thankfully, being able to choose how many spaces you move is something that you could do in 4th Edition with the help of certain abilities or cards. One of the biggest benefits of using the Talisman engine that we’ve worked with over the past 10 years (check out our last developer blog for more information on that!), is that for a lot of common effects, we’ve already got a working framework that we can reapply to different situations.

So instead of having to entirely make this new movement system from scratch, we were able to apply the ‘choose how many spaces you move’ ability so characters can use it when they spend fate to reroll for movement. As a side note, we’ve found this rule change has been one of the biggest for the impact it has on the speed of a game - there’s a lot less jumping over the same item you’re trying to grab over and over again!

[h2]Fighting for Fate[/h2]

Another additional rule that didn’t exist in earlier editions of Talisman, but is now in 5th Edition: ‘When two characters fight, the loser now gains 1 fate afterwards.’

Similarly to the new movement fate rules, this is a blanket rule that applies to all characters at all times, and is using rules/interactions we already had in the Talisman engine, albeit in a different context!



Applying this blanket rule into something like the current version of Talisman: Digital Edition with all the edge-cases, card effects and character interactions that can happen with 15+ expansions would cause all sorts of issues with it not working 100% of the time. However, making sure that this rule is applied all the time from the ground up in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is much easier, as we can make sure that absolutely everything we design and implement related to combat takes this extra fate for the loser into account - much less messy!

[h2]Making the Warlock Less Social[/h2]

One of the most common rules issues that players would come to us specifically about in the digital edition of Talisman was that to cross the Portal of Power, you cannot have an active Warlock quest. In 90% of games, this ruling wouldn’t appear at all - but when you’ve made your way to the centre of the board only to find you’re blocked because the Warlock isn’t happy with you leaving your quests unfinished, it could be a real kick in the teeth.

In this new Edition of Talisman, the Warlock has been changed to make him a lot less strict when it comes to his quests! Specifically in 5th Edition, if you have a Warlock's Quest and you gain a Talisman by any other means, your quest ends and you are not teleported to the Warlock's Cave.



If you’ve played Talisman: Digital Edition, you’ll know very well that the Warlock just loves bringing you back to his cave every single time you complete a quest for him! In 5th Edition however, the way the Warlock works has been updated to make him only bring you back if he’s got a Talisman to give you!

[h2]Incremental Trophy Trading[/h2]

In Talisman: Digital Edition, one of the more popular house rules we found players using is ‘Trophy Trading - Incremental Value’.



For those who aren’t aware, in 4th Edition, to gain a Strength or a Craft, you needed to trade in at least 7 points worth of either stat.

Now, in 5th Edition, the amount of trophy values traded in to increase your Strength needs to be equal to or greater than your current Strength. So, if your strength is 4, you need to trade in 4+ in trophies to increase 1 strength, and this is the same for Craft.

Thanks to us already having a house rule that functioned similarly in Talisman: Digital Edition, making the default rule for trophy trading was a relatively smooth process - in order to ensure that it works as intended though, our QA team have had to push their characters Craft/Strength to some absurd numbers to make sure the game can handle it. Just because we know that there are players out there who won’t be satisfied unless they can get up to 500 Strength.

[h2]Talismans to Trinkets[/h2]

Apparently, the transition from 4th Edition to 5th Edition shrunk down the size of the average Talisman! In 5th Edition, Talisman cards do not count towards your carry limit (like trinkets) and you can only carry 1. They also cannot be dropped on the board intentionally.



This is another blanket rules change that was fairly simple for us to implement thanks to us stripping the Talisman engine back to its absolute basics. While it’s not as easy as just making all Talisman cards into Cursed Trinkets, we can apply similar logic to those effects onto them, ensuring that they function as they should within the rules framework we’ve set out.

[h2]Temporary Toading[/h2]

One of the most iconic parts of the Talisman experience, turning into a toad has also been updated and rebalanced in Talisman: 5th Edition. Now, your toad transformation lasts just for one turn, not 3. They also cannot use fate, which is a new restriction on their abilities.

Again, this change to a fundamental aspect of the game is something that would have caused us a whole heap of issues if we hadn’t stripped the Talisman engine back. Toading is something that a lot of elements of Talisman: Digital Edition cared about, from just the base game to its expansions.

[h2]Alignment Selection[/h2]

Out of all the rules changes that we had to account for, between 4th and 5th Edition, this might be one of the biggest - Players can select their alignment at the start of the game.

Now, changing alignment is something that we’ve had built into Talisman: Digital Edition in many forms, even allowing you to change the alignment of other characters with certain effects! However, selecting your alignment at the start for each and every game means that players now have a choice to make at the start of each game, adding an extra step to the setup of the game.

To make this easier, we’ve added the alignment selection to the same screen as character selection, so you don’t need to wait while everyone goes through the alignment selection process.



Taking the decision out of the players hands meant that in our digital adaptation of 4th Edition, we could just wait until fate becomes relevant to introduce it as a mechanic that the player needs to keep in mind. But now that there is an important decision to be made at the start of the game, we’ve had to look again at how we describe the reasons for choosing each alignment, so players feel like they make an informed choice.

[h2]Board Changes[/h2]

The rules and characters weren’t the only thing to change between 4th and 5th Edition - so did the game board! For some spaces, the changes were minor (like the Crags no longer losing you a turn), and for others there were major changes, like how the Crown of Command works!

For anyone who doesn’t know, in previous versions of Talisman, you’d have to cast the Command Spell until all the other players were defeated - while this definitely added tension to the end of the game, it could also lead to games going on for far longer than they needed to. With the new ending in 5th Edition, you’ll end the game by slaying the dragon at the centre of the board. Thanks to our experience in Talisman: Digital Edition (and all the various endings we ended up adding over the years), we’ve got a pretty good handle on updating and changing endings.



Some of the spaces hadn’t changed in function, but had changed in design however - for example, ‘draw card’ spaces now show a +1/+2 symbol for drawing cards, which we needed to account for when figuring out how we’ll show that information to the player.

After making a comprehensive list of changes, we got to work on updating all of the spaces that functioned differently in 5th Edition. Because we were working off the work we’d done previously on spaces in Talisman: Digital Edition (both in the base game and in expansions), we were very used to adjusting how spaces work on the board, making the changes much easier than they would have been otherwise!

[h2]Adventure and Spell Cards[/h2]

One of the most exciting parts of any Talisman game is when you land on a space and draw an adventure card, with no clue what might be waiting for you. 5th Edition carries on that tradition, with many cards continuing their inclusion from all the way back in 1st Edition, and some new additions too.

Just like with the board, some of these changes are minor - but some changes (like the Guide letting you sneak past the Sentinel) we’ve already found make a big difference in the playtesting we’ve been doing!



Just like with the Talisman board, we made a comprehensive list of all the changes we needed to be aware of between 4th and 5th Edition, and got to work on implementing all the changes we needed to make. In the current developer build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, all the cards in the game now properly follow their 5th Edition instructions, we’re now testing to make sure that’s always the case!

[h2]Ensuring all Changes Play Nicely[/h2]

If you’ve reached this part of this developer blog, you’ll appreciate that these changes all together add up quite quickly! Because of that, we’ve made sure to thoroughly test all these changes alongside each other, so that new rules changes and updates to one aspect of the game don’t interfere with new changes elsewhere - we don’t want the new toading rules acting weird because we’ve changed how alignment selection works!



We’re also updating the AI in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition to make sure they’re aware of (and make the correct decisions for!) these new rules and changes. Right now they’re a bit too happy to spend their fate to move to specific locations on the board, but thanks to us stripping back to its most basic state, we can build back upon it to make it behave much better than it ever did before. But talking about the Talisman AI in detail is going to wait for a future developer blog!

And that’s the end of our latest Talisman: Digital 5th Edition developer blog! We hope you’ve enjoyed this look at how we’re updating the rules and gameplay, and can’t wait to show you more of the game 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!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

Hey Talisman fans! ːBlueTalismanː

As we're progressing through development of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we want to make sure we're aware of what you, the Talisman community, want and expect in the game!

That's why we've put together a player survey, where you can share your thoughts and help inform our decisions going forward, both before and after the game launches. You can find it here.

As a small studio, we can keep an eye on discussions and get a general vibe of how people are feeling around the game, but surveys like this help us get a much more accurate reading on how you're all feeling! So as a way to say thanks, we're going to be giving away some Talisman: 5th Edition and Talisman: Digital 5th Edition prizes as thanks to lucky people out there who complete the survey. Entries (and this survey) close on Friday, 26th of July 2024, so don't miss out!

Thanks in advance, and we can't wait to show you more of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition! ːTalProToadː

Hi Talisman fans! ːTalProToadː

We're extremely excited to finally be able to talk about all the cool stuff we've been working on for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and give you a quick early look at how development is coming along! If you want to stay up-to-date with even more Talisman: Digital 5th Edition news and blogs like this, make sure you wishlist the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

As we’ve been working away in secret on the game over the last few months, we’ve got lots of exciting features, behind-the-scenes updates and looks at how the game has been coming along so far to show you, here in our first developer blog! Please keep in mind that we’re still a long way from release, so everything you see in this dev blog is still in the early stages of development and is subject to change.

Also, there’s some stuff we’ve been working on that isn’t mentioned in this blog (like the updated user interface and all the 5th Edition specific rules we’ve been integrating). That’s because we’re saving talking about them until a future developer blog, where we can go into way more detail! Rather than gloss over all the cool things we’re doing, we want to make sure you get a proper look at what development of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is shaping up to be. So expect to see much more of these developer blogs between now and release, and make sure you follow us everywhere so that you don’t miss any!

So without further ado, let’s start showing off what we’ve been working on for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

[h2]Stripping Back the Talisman: Digital Edition Engine[/h2]

The game engine we use to make Talisman: Digital Edition was originally adapted from a proprietary engine, and we’ve worked with it for over 11 years now. So when we knew we were making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we had two options. We could either:

• Start fresh with an entirely new engine (like Unreal/Unity).
  
• Use the same engine we’d developed and used for Talisman: Digital Edition.

After a lot of internal discussions and testing of what we could achieve with the current Talisman: Digital Edition engine, we decided that the best plan would be to use the same engine. But after 11 years of build built upon, updated and edited, the engine for Talisman: Digital Edition has accrued quite a lot of tech debt.

To use an analogy to explain what that ‘tech debt’ is: Imagine you’ve got a house that you’ve lived in for 11 years - you’ve made yourself really comfortable in there, you’ve got used to all the quirks of living there, and you know which floorboards you shouldn’t put weight on, and which ones you can. Over the years, you’ve had to patch up the walls, put tape over some pipes to stop leaks - and if you turn off the light upstairs, the fridge stops working (but nobody has a clue why). That’s where we’re at with Talisman: Digital Edition.

Now, when making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we looked at our old house and realised that if we stripped it down to its foundations, we’d have a really solid framework to build back up from. And so, our team got to work on ripping up the floorboards, pulling out the busted pipes and removing both the light upstairs and the fridge - from a programming point of view. It took us a good while, but eventually we were left with an extremely basic version of Talisman: Digital Edition, where everything worked smoothly specifically because there was only the framework left - when you’ve knocked down the walls, it’s hard for bugs to hide behind them!

One of the basic things we kept in was the game setup screen - looks shinier now though!

And since then, we’ve been able to use the framework we’ve been working with for the last 11 years to build up Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - only this time, we’ve been able to use all our experience and hindsight to know where and how we should build back better.

An early look at the Digital 5th Edition game board, using the framework of Digital Classic Edition as a basis for the layout.

We appreciate that our house analogy has been doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but we hope that explains why we’re using the Talisman: Digital Edition engine for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!

We know that a lot of you would ask why we’ve not used an entirely new engine, and we want to be as transparent as we can when we explain why - and we don’t want you to think it was an easy decision to make! At one point, we even got as far as making a demo in Unreal Engine to fully explore what would be the best options for you as players, alongside us as developers.

Adventure Cards like the Magic Portal work similarly in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition as they did in Talisman: Classic Edition.

[h2]Visual Improvements[/h2]

For anyone who’s taken even a quick look at Talisman: 5th Edition, one of the things that strikes you immediately is the fresh, modern look of the game. Games Workshop and Avalon Hill have done an amazing job of bringing a fresh new style to Talisman, while keeping the iconic, fantasy look that we’ve all come to expect over the last 40 years.

Our art team know how to make sense of all these menus - the rest of us, not so much!

Of course, we wanted to make sure that style was matched in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, so our art team have been hard at work over the past year on making sure that Talisman: Digital 5th Edition looks as good as it possibly can. We might be biased, but we think they’ve done a great job!

Check out our fully 3D, coloured-in character models in action! Ever wanted to know what the top of the Dwarf’s head looks like? You’re welcome.

We’ve still got more work to do on making the board, characters and the entire experience feel much more ‘polished’ than Talisman: Digital Edition, but we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made so far.

[h2]Adding All the New Cards[/h2]

If you’ve already taken a look at a physical copy of Talisman: 5th Edition, you’ll know that the adventure cards included with the game are a bit different to what you’d find in 4th Edition! Not only have they got a new layout and awesome new artwork, but many of the cards have been tweaked to better fit the rules and design of Talisman: 5th Edition.

This is what all the cards looked like before our awesome art team got to work! And this is what they look like in-game now!

While we’ve still currently got some work to do to make all the artwork for these cards viewable in the current build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’ve been able to update all the cards with their updated rules text, and they all function as they should in 5th Edition. Part of the benefit of working with a stripped back Talisman engine (check out the long analogy above for reference!) is that we already had a system in place to handle how standard rules in Talisman work within the game.

One of the more interesting things our QA team found in a development build - multiple Hexes!

For example, if we have an adventure card that makes you gain 1 gold, and an adventure card that makes you gain 2 gold, we don’t have to specifically program that individual card to give you 1 gold. Instead we can assign the same ‘give 1 gold’ action to that card that we do for all other in-game actions that give you 1 gold.

[h2]Setup a Build Machine[/h2]

One of the earlier things we did for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is something we do for all our games, but is still an important milestone! For those unfamiliar with build machines, it’s basically a server that is used to package everything that a game needs into a format that a computer (or console) can open and run.

Because Talisman: Digital 5th Edition is being worked on by multiple developers here at Nomad, it’s important that we can all separately work on the game and make changes at the same time, so we can work together efficiently. Now that the Talisman: Digital 5th Edition build machine is all set up, we can create testable, playable versions of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition whenever we need/want to.

[h2]New Effects System[/h2]

We’ve been making digital board games for over 11 years now here at Nomad Games, and since then we’ve learned a lot about ways we can make your digital board gaming experience more exciting. When you’re playing a digital board game, you can add all sorts of shiny effects, sounds and visual flair that you’d never see if you’re playing with plain ol’ cardboard.

We’re still finalising a lot of these effects before we show them off to you, but one effect we can show you is how we’re adding a subtle parallax effect to all adventure cards - if you’ve played Mystic Vale (one of our previous digital board games!), you’ll recognise the technique we’ve used. This time, we’re keeping it a bit more subtle though, we don’t want to distract you too much from what’s happening on the board!

Check out the parallax effect on this army of Gnomes - enough to fill a garden!

[h2]New 3D Characters In-Game[/h2]

If you’ve played Talisman: Digital Edition previously and zoomed in as close as you can, you might have noticed that the character models aren’t actually 3D. Instead, it’s a 2D image that we rotate and move so that it gives the illusion of a 3D model on the Talisman board. If you’ve never noticed this before, we’re massively sorry for shattering your world-view. ːToad_Itemː

Check out these early renders of the classic Talisman roster!

Thanks to the upgrades we were able to make to the Talisman: Digital Edition engine (check out the “Stripping Back the Talisman Engine” section earlier!), we’re now able to fully render characters in 3D on the board. So you can appreciate them from every angle, just as you would with the physical game!

The Monk, off on another adventure in all his three dimensional glory!

Want to see what the back of the new Wizard looks like? We’re proud to say we’re making your dream a reality.

[h2]And Even More![/h2]

What we’ve covered above is only a peek at what we’ve been working on for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - we’re going to be sharing even more behind-the-scenes looks at the game as it goes through development over the coming months.

So if you want to see more of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, make sure you follow us on all our socials, and wishlist the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/908060/Talisman_Digital_5th_Edition/

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