Dawnsbury Days News

This update adds alchemical bombs, fixes bugs, adds additional rewards for alternate classes into the main campaign, slightly reduces the difficulty of the final boss on Insane difficulty, and adds new art for some creatures (thank you to Qwert and Jakub!).

In this update, I and Danni, who created and maintains the large mod DawnniExpanded and its associated mods, have also moved some features from that mod into the base game, such as the iconic Scorching Ray spell or the Leap action. Thank you to Danni for your work!

Here's the full changelist:

New character content:

• Basic action: Leap
  
• Monk feat: Gorilla Stance
  
• General feat: Powerful Leap
  
• Items: light pick, ghost charge, dread ampoule, alchemist's fire (lesser and moderate variants)
  
• Spells: scorching ray, false life

Balancing:

• Encounters (S1E5): Added +1 handwraps of mighty blows as an extra reward at end of chapter 1
  
• Encounters (S2E4): Added a gate attenuator as a reward instead of a +1 heavy crossbow after winning the fourth encounter in chapter 2
  
• Encounters (S4E5): On Insane difficulty, the final boss no longer has the elite adjustments. It still has elite adjustments in its second form.

New art:

• Forest Canopy, Earthbreaker, Happy Tree
  

Bugfixes:

• Steam: The achievement "Surprise round" didn't trigger if you had a non-undetected animal companion, ally or minion in play.
  
• Rules: Being in cover didn't give you a circumstance bonus to Stealth checks.
  
• Spells (Spiritual Weapon, Flaming Sphere): Sustaining proxy spells incorrectly provoked attacks of opportunity.
  
• Encounters (Training Grounds): The new background image had a baked-in grid.
  
• Items: Fixed that gate attenuators would not recharge overnight if they were placed in the loot box.
  
• Ancestries (Dwarf): Unburdened Iron didn't reduce speed penalties from effects and tower shields.
  
• Spells (Friendfetch): Friendfetch did not move unconscious allies.
  

Modding:

• Modding: Fixed that modded worn traits displayed as "worn 41004" rather than "worn runestone" etc.
  
• Modding: You can now register your own item modifications with ItemModification.RegisterItemModification. This could allow for implementing staves.
  

First, thank you to all players for your interest in Dawnsbury Days! I am happy you enjoyed the game, and I appreciate all the feedback you submitted, either in Steam reviews or in the Google form linked from within the game, and I read all of it and make notes.

Dawnsbury Days is not early access or live service. It's a complete premium released indie game, with a beginning and end and a reasonable amount of polish. And yet—as you may have got from the updates over the last three months—I can't seem to be able to put it down.

As such, I decided to continue feature development for Dawnsbury Days, even if it must now be slower than previously.

So here's my plans for Dawnsbury Days:


[h2]Five areas for development[/h2]
There are five different areas where I see myself spending time: (1) supporting modders; (2) large creatures and reach; (3) art upgrades; (4) character levels 5-8; (5) a DLC expansion.

I expect to work on all of them simultaneously, depending on where I currently feel inspired. Let me talk a little bit about each areas.

1. Supporting modders. This is what I've been mostly doing for the last 3 months since the release. This involves adding modding endpoints, making bugfixes or doing refactoring or base game changes in order to enable modders to add the classes, spells or other content that they wish to add. I expect to continue doing this as a priority, alongside minor technical improvements and fixing any reported bugs.

2. Large creatures and reach? Reach weapons are noted as the most obvious missing content in Dawnsbury Days currently. And large creatures would allow the DLC campaign to have some famous monsters as well as enable some more cinematic combats, e.g. against a large dragon or a hydra. It would be nice. But: this is by far the most technically challenging addition to the game's code. It would require changes in more than 500 code locations, as so many actions, spells and feats rely on the fact that one creature can occupy only one tile. Getting something working would be easier, and I can afford some minor differences from tabletop rules, but overall I would need the system to be consistent and reliable, which means that everything should just work, and that really means touching all the individual pieces. I am not at all confident that I can do this, which is why this area has a question mark. I want to explore this option but I cannot commit to it.

I am also aware that a Patreon poll I ran previously resulted in an expansion receiving more of a priority over large creatures and reach, which is another reason why I'm not sure about this area.

A new expansion would want selling points, and "large creatures" is a substantial and interesting addition, but currently, this is still more of a dream than a committed effort.

3. Art upgrades. While a lot of the creature art in Dawnsbury Days was drawn specifically for Dawnsbury Days by Qwert, some of the art is stock art I've purchased from stock art or game art websites and sometimes doesn't fit very well. In this area, I would contract artists to draw creature tokens for some of these pieces to replace that stock art.

By the time this post goes up, this is largely done. Hurray! There ist still some art I want to replace or improve, but I would not expect the game art to change significantly anymore.

4. Character levels 5-8. This is, of course, one of the big areas. This area means extending the class chassis of each class up to level 8, and coding enough level 3 and level 4 spells for each tradition and school to offer a reasonable selection to spellcasters, as well as enough ancestry feats, general feats and class feats to offer a real selection for all characters, and additional higher-level impulses of each element for kineticists.



This is something I'm working on now. When I have something reasonably presentable for playtesting, I will let you know so you can contribute to playtesting as well if you're interested.

Ultimately, I intend for character levels 5-8 to be released as a free update to the base game. This is more of a technical decision to allow modders to not worry about whether the user has a DLC installed. I do not currently intend to market the base game as reaching up to level 8, because the Dawnsbury Days campaign only goes up to level 4 and that's the main draw of Dawnsbury Days.

Yes, many people play free encounters, but most play the campaign.

5. DLC expansion. This brings me to the encounter content where you'd actually be able to use all of these new levels. I have some initial thoughts on this, but there is not much set in stone yet. I'll expand more on this later.

I am aware that there was significant support for a roguelike mode in a poll I ran. That is something I'm thinking about as well, but I did not yet manage to come up with a design that I'd be happy with. Importantly, it feels out-of-place for an expansion to add both character levels and a roguelike mode, but not extra storyline content for those additional levels. I'll continue to look into it as well, but I currently place greater hopes in a campaign-style expansion.

In any case, I expect the expansion to be paid DLC which would cost $5.

Conclusion
This is called the summer development plan, but it is not a roadmap and it is not a timeline. I am specifically not committing to any date yet and I can't even estimate until I have a good handle on the scope of the expansion.

This said, if you have any questions, comments or feedback, I'll always be happy for them, either here, in a feedback form or on the game Discord!

Art improvements

• The creature tokens for Lantern Archon, Flumph and Avatar of the Heart of Fire (reborn variant) have been changed from stock art into bespoke art created for Dawnsbury Days (thank you to artists Qwert and waffleartt!). Multiple players commented on the fact that the existing stock art didn't really fit these three creatures so I'm happy to have it replaced.
  
• Map backgrounds have been added to all additional scenarios in the free encounter mode, meaning that now all Dawnsbury Days maps have full map backgrounds and don't use the simple tiles (thank you to designer marshall for this work!)
  

New character content

• New feats: Confabulator, Nimble Crawl
  

Modding

• Modding: Mods added locally now load after all mods loaded from the Steam Workshop, which will help with creating mods that are dependent on other mods.
  
• Modding: Added `ModManager.RegisterActionOnEachActionPossibility` to allow for mods to make quick adjustments to base game actions
  

Bugfixes

• Classes (Cleric): Deadly Simplicity (and other feats) no longer have double the effect when you somehow acquire them twice.
  
• Classes (Strategist): Shared Stratagem also made the target flat-footed to doors.
  
• Feats (Battle Medicine): Battle Medicine now requires you to have a free hand.
  
• Rules (Escape): When you're escaping a grapple, the DC is now correctly based on Athletics rather than Acrobatics.
  
• Spells (Obscuring Mist): You could dismiss Obscuring Mist multiple times
  

And here's some screenshots:


Thank you all again for playing!

Performance improvements

• Performance: Fixed startup bugs and deferred the loading of assets, greatly reducing startup time. On my computer, with all mods installed, the time-to-first-draw went down from 10 seconds to 1 second; and time-to-main-menu went down from 14 seconds to 3 seconds (counted from time you click the "Play" button in Steam). With fewer mods installed, your performance benefit may be less visible, but is still noticeable.
  
• Performance: Updated the runtime from .NET 6.0 to .NET 8.0, which greatly improves performance throughout the game.
  

Bugfixes

• Classes (Fighter, Barbarian): When you were quickened and used the extra action to Sudden Charge, then cancel, the rules engine crashed.
  
• Modding: Spells displayed as blue spell links in the character editor always showed up as though they were improved psychic spells even if they're not psychic spells
  
• Modding: If a mod replaced wizard schools, they showed up as a trait ID instead of trait name in spell preparation pages
  

Enemy tactics:

• Tactics: Enemies provoked attacks of opportunity too often. Enemies will still provoke fairly often but archers and spellcasters will now be a bit smarter and, if possible, unless it's at a cost of weaker actions, will in most situations sometimes step away from a threatening opponent before shooting or casting a spell.
  

Modding improvements:

• Modding: Added Trait.SpellCannotBeChosenInCharacterBuilder to allow mods to suppress some spells from character builder.
  
• Modding: Fixed that if you unsubscribed from a mod that adds a spell while you had that spell on a spell scroll, your character library might be erased on next load. Now, instead only that spell scroll will be removed from your characters.
  
• Modding: Fixed that the Swashbuckler's Goading Feint crashes the rules engine in MakeMainRollAndApplyEffect.
  
• Modding: Grapple now has an ActionId.
  
• Modding: Mods can have dependencies on other mods, and if you're not subscribed to the dependency, Dawnsbury Days might crash. Starting in this update, Dawnsbury Days will enforce Steam Workshop dependencies and if you're missing a dependency, Dawnsbury Days will offer you the option to subscribe to it.
  
• Modding: The Mod trait didn't automatically apply to modded feats added without the CustomFeat feat name.
  

Bugfixes:

• Ancestries (Human), Modding: Fixed that if you had spells from multiple sources, the spellcasting ability modifier would sometimes appear incorrectly in the character builder in feat selection for Dragon Spit ancestry feat and in prepared casters' spell preparation pages.
  
• Ancestries (Human): Dragon Spit did not grant spellcasting proficiency in innate spells.
  
• Audio: Insects and animals now have their own death noise.
  
• Classes (Kineticist): Fixed a crash when a kineticist used a fire elemental blast underwater.
  
• Classes (Magus): The Laughing Shadow Magus only received a +5 bonus to Speed instead of +10 when unarmored.
  
• Feats (Trick Magic Item): Three-action spells showed as though they are castable with Trick Magic Item in inventories.
  

System:

• System: Added a link to %APPDATA%/Dawnsbury into system settings in Dawnsbury Days, to make collecting log files easier