Dawnsbury Days News

A new version of Dawnsbury Days is approaching the finish line, and alongside, a story-based expansion with 24 new encounters to play through on character levels 5–8.

The expansion will cost $5 and will have these features:

• Play at character levels 5-8, including 100+ new spells and 60+ new feats
  
• 24 encounters, including noncombat encounters, multi-stage encounters and exploration encounters
  
• 30+ new monsters, hazards, subsystems and other obstacles
  
• Fully voice-acted cutscenes bookending each encounter!
  
• Narrative continues just after the end of the original story — you can even import your characters from the previous adventure
  

At the same time, the base game will be updated with bug fixes, user interface improvements and new character content, including:

• New ancestries: Halfling, Gnome, Leshy, Goblin, Oozekin
  
• New heritages: Mixed heritage, Aasimar, Tiefling
  
• New classes: Bard, Oracle
  
• New feats
  
• New spells
  
• New items, and a rune subsystem
  
• New encounters for the free encounter mode
  
• More improvements! Wait for the patch notes...
  

However, before the release, we still need to conduct a major prerelease playtest and I'm now recruiting players interested in rooting out bugs and providing feedback on both the new character content and the new higher-level adventure.

If you're interested in participating in this playtest, please sign up at this Google form. I very much appreciate everyone who would be willing to assist.

Dawnsbury Days, with the updates it's had since release and especially the updates that will come alongside the Profane Barrier, is now a huge game. It has 361 feats and 268 spells now (!), and that's before we get into mods or items. It is no longer possible for one person to test all of this, so a major playtest is very necessary.

Click here to sign up for the playtest.

Development of The Profane Barrier, an expansion for Dawnsbury Days, is nearing completion.

Here's the release roadmap:



Some things still need to be done or implemented, and I still need to add voice acting to all the Profane Barrier cutscenes, but we're rapidly approaching a time when the major prerelease playtest of the expansion will begin.

I expect the playtest to begin in March. It will be a larger-scale private playtest. I will announce here on Steam when registration for the playtest opens.

If the playtest reveals no major issues, then a release would follow afterwards.

[h2]On achievements[/h2]

At the beginning of the playtest, I will introduce new Steam achievements to Dawnsbury Days. Some of these will be for features that will be added to Dawnsbury Days base game with the expansion — such as the Bard and Oracle classes — but most of these will be for achievements in the Profane Barrier campaign.

Steam does not have the capability to track DLC-specific achievements separately — they must be added to the base game.

That means that from the beginning of the playtest until the release of the expansion, it will not be possible for players outside the playtest to collect all Dawnsbury Days achievements.

I'm sorry for that. I recognize it's not ideal to have a game in a state where you can't collect all the achievements. I am postponing the publishing of the achievements as much as I can to minimize the time when Dawnsbury Days isn't 100%-completable, but ultimately the new achievements need to be playtested as well, so I need to publish them for the playtest.

There are currently 52 achievements. Until Profane Barrier is released, then, please consider that if you have 52 achievements in Dawnsbury Days, you have the trophy and you 100% fully completed the game.

Thank you for understanding, and I'm excited to begin the major playtest and share the Profane Barrier and higher-level gameplay with everyone soon!

Bugfixes:

• Fixed the long-standing bug where scrolling in character editor, shop and combat log sometimes didn't work if your FPS dropped below 60.
  

Performance:

• Slightly increased the responsiveness to mouse and keyboard input throughout the game.
  

Details:

This patches fixes the most annoying bug in Dawnsbury Days. Over the past year since the game's release, this bug was reported 11 times in the Dawnsbury Days feedback form, at least 3 times on the Steam forums and at least twice on Discord, far more than any other bug.

The bug was that if you used the mouse scroll wheel to scroll through spell lists, shop items, your feats or anywhere else where scrolling is needed, sometimes the game didn't scroll. If you tried to drag the scroll bar by dragging with mouse left button, it also sometimes didn't work, and neither did clicking on an empty space in the scroll bar.

But despite the impact and the number of reports, the bug was also really hard to track down. Players who reported it couldn't reliably reproduce it. Often restarting the game "fixed" the bug, or moving the game to another monitor screen and sometimes the bug would appear only in some screens and not others.

This week, thanks also to recent detailed reports by beets and SwingRipper (thank you both very much!), I finally tracked down the bug and fixed it. Scrollbars should now always work for everyone, whether using the wheel or left-click-dragging, and regardless of your FPS.

The technical explanation is that if your game runs at less than 60 FPS, then two or more update cycles will sometimes happen without a draw cycle in between them. Update cycles normally handle input, but scrollbars are an exception and input to them is handled in draw cycles. On low FPS, there are more update cycles than draw cycles and as a result, the input may be "processed" and forgotten before it reaches the next draw cycle and thus the scrollbar logic.

Work on the level 5-8 expansion for Dawnsbury Days continues at speed and this week, I announced the casting call for voice actors for the roles of new characters in the new story. I thought this would be a good opportunity to update everyone here on the progress as well.

As evidenced by the casting call, the story and script for the expansion is written. It's a 4-chapter story consisting of some 24 encounters, slightly longer than the base game, and it takes place over four character levels, from level 5 up to level 8. The story continues where Dawnsbury Days left off, starting with an ambush against Dawnsbury and the search for a seemingly kidnapped child, but soon much greater stakes appear.

Private playtests have already happened for the first 3 out of the 4 chapters and while they discovered a lot of bugs (that's the point of playtests, in part), they also confirmed that overall, the concept of the expansion works.

I still expect a much larger private playtest to happen near the end of development, after voice acting is in and after most of the obvious bugs are fixed, because I'd like more people playing then to arrive at the proper balance for each difficulty level and to flush out the rarer bugs as well. The fact is that Dawnsbury Days has so much content that I think it's no longer possible for any one person to even play all of the content, much less playtest. For example, one of the latest bugfixes in the beta branch is "Fixed that the transmuter wizard's Shifting Form didn't grant a bonus to speed if you chose legs."

We were lucky that such a bug was even noticed -- and it was a modder who noticed this by reviewing the game source code. To find such a bug naturally, you'd have to play a wizard, of the transmutation school, cast your focus spell, choose legs, and then still notice that your actual speed didn't increase. My hope is that with a larger playtest before release, we can discover more of these bugs before release. I'll make a post here to announce this when it happens.

With regards character content overall, the game is pretty much finished.

There is a larger variety of spells at spell levels 1-4, for all schools and traditions, and a small sample of spells for higher levels, such as chain lightning, dominate or even time stop (this is mostly for use by enemies, though you can play with these spells as well in free encounter mode).

There is a lot of class feats, runes of all kinds, materials and a lot of different worn items that give passive bonuses or extra once-per-day abilities (or both). There's certainly a lot more customization available than in the base game. Customization is still lacking a little for the kineticist -- I mean, the kineticist has more class feats than all other classes, and a whole bunch of options at level 5 when expanding the gate, but because of how many different kineticists there can be, it still doesn't feel like enough so I still hope to add more impulses.

You may have also noticed that I haven't published a new update for Dawnsbury Days in a month now. That is unfortunate and I'm sorry but the fact is that the base game is now stable, and the codebase has diverged too much between the base game and the beta branch, and adding new functionality to the base game is now too time-consuming, so I'm adding the new features, including new character content, to the beta branch only.

If you want to benefit from these improvements, you can go to Steam properties for Dawnsbury Days and switch to the beta branch "v3.0". You will be able to use runes, new items, new spells etc. and even play some of the new encounters (though the actual new campaign will not be available to you unless you're in the private playtest). If you do this, I'll be happy for any feedback or bug reports.

In the end, the branches will merge and the new ancestries, heritages, feats, spells, items and other improvements currently available in v3.0 will become available for everyone, probably at the same tim as the Profane Barrier DLC releases. (Though these updates will be free and part of the base game -- only the new encounters and story content will be part of the paid expansion.)

So that's where we are now!

The casting call ends on January 10th and you're welcome to participate but I will note that the casting call spoils a detailed breakdown of the story as well as of all characters in the DLC, including all twists, so keep these spoilers in mind when deciding whether to click on the casting call link.

After that, we'll start recording the voice over and work will continue on the last chapter of the Profane Barrier.

Development on the Profane Barrier, a Dawnsbury Days expansion, is proceeding and the first three chapters of the expansion are now ready for early private playtesting.

This is not yet pre-launch playtesting. There is still no voice acting, and there is some placeholder art, and of course, there is a bunch of bugs and rules inaccuracies.

But most of the expansion content is ready for playtesting:

• High-level spells
  
• High-level ancestry and class feats
  
• Class skeleton and features at higher levels
  
• High-level items, runes and material subsystem
  
• The first three chapters of the expansion
  

If you're interested in reporting bugs, reporting on balancing and difficulty, explaining what you found fun and what you found annoying, and giving overall notes and comments on the high-level content and encounters, you can now register for the playtest at this Google form: https://forms.gle/b62mXMMYbroDWgo9A

This is not early access to the expansion — this is a form to request invitation into a closed private playtest, where you'd be expected to submit feedback.

The early private playtest is private — if you participate, I'd also expect you to not speak about the playtest content except in Discord channels dedicated to the playtest.

To show a little bit of the Profane Barrier, here's a scene from the opening of the expansion, with Scarlet gamemastering for children of Dawnsbury:



And here's some of the high-level character content you can now use, in this case, it's arcane spells:



But there is much more to playtest! So, if you are interested in helping with this playtest, please consider signing up!