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:
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!