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.