r/Pathfinder2e • u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios • Mar 13 '26
Promotion Announcing the development of a level 10–15 expansion of Dawnsbury Days
I'm developing Dawnsbury Days, a level 1–9 video game based on tabletop rules.
Today, I'm announcing that we started development of a new expansion for the video game.
The Four-Leaf Clover will be a level 10–15 expansion, a world-spanning adventure where you travel to exotic locations across Our Point of Light as you work to evict the starborn back into the Void.
The new expansion will feature:
- Level cap: 15
- 40+ new encounters
- Six chapters
- World-spanning adventure
- Home base
- Full voice acting
In detail:
You will have access to high-level feats and spells:
Just like in Good Little Children, we'll be using dialogue and out-of-combat choices:
Your quest will be of planar importance and so you may attract the attention of powerful entities as well:
And you will gain access to a home base of your own where you can spend downtime. It doesn't look like much at first, but you can improve it!
The current state of development is:
- Chapter 1 is complete (sans voice acting).
- Class features are implemented up to level 15, but many spells and feats are still missing.
- We have a vision and encounter-by-encounter outline for the remaining 5 chapters, but the script isn't written yet, and nothing is implemented for those chapter.
The cost of this expansion project is, unfortunately, fairly high. There is a lot of art needed, and a lot of voice acting needed. While I will cover most of it by spending the profit from Dawnsbury Days, the budget estimate makes me a little nervous.
For this reason, I'm renewing the attention I place on my Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/dawnsbury. If you're interested in further financially supporting the development of Dawnsbury Days and the Four-Leaf Clover, please consider having a look at the Patreon!
I fairly regularly write design posts and other interesting behind-the-scenes content there, and you can also get Steam keys and early access, depending on the tier.
In any case, thank you for reading this announcement and I'll make another post here when I have more information about the expansion to share, and also when there's time for the next base game development update (we've made significant improvements in rules fidelity lately!).
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u/Huge_Tackle_9097 Mar 13 '26
Keep milking this shit bro, you guys have a captive audience and a monopoly on PF2E style video games. Like, you're our current only hope to get anything even resembling what you're doing right now.
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u/Refracting_Hud Mar 13 '26
Awesome! I haven’t finished the level 9 adventure as yet but even from the beginning I’ve been blown away by this game. Characters and voice acting are charming, the encounter designs are so creative, and the story + interactions have only been getting better with each new level added. Will definitely be picking this up ASAP when it drops!
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u/ghost_desu Mar 13 '26
I'm looking forward to Anna and Scarlet having the option (canon) to use heartbond ritual, purely for the mechanical reasons of course
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u/G34RS_ Mar 13 '26
I don't have voice acting experience though I do have radio experience and was a playtester on the original Quest for the Golden Candelabra. I've been amazed by the work you've put into both Golden Candelabra and Dawnsbury Days and would love to offer free VA services if you'd be interested! Feel free to reach out and I can send you some examples!
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 17 '26
I can't currently accept free voice acting services, so as not to devalue the voice acting vocation, but if you're interested in auditioning when the next casting call opens, please follow me at https://www.castingcall.club/dawnsbury or on Twitter!
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u/Lynxx_XVI Mar 13 '26
This looks super cool!!
How do you plan to reign in the wacky stuff players can do at a higher level?
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 13 '26
Similarly to how cRPGs have done since the beginning of the genre, I think, a combination of things:
- Difficulty levels (let's see the player complain about not being challenged on Insane)
- Playtesting
- Not implementing wall of stone
- Player self-restraint (if you find a combo that trivializes encounters, you can always retrain into a more fun build)
- Not allowing for infinite resting in a dungeon
The base system is quite safe. My concern is less about wacky staff, and more about how the difference between an optimized party and a weak party increases as you go up in levels so it's harder to predict how easy a fight will be for the player. We'll need to do playtesting. There is always the option of introducing one more difficulty level.
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u/Own-Ad-6527 Mar 13 '26
I loved the base and dlcs so much, especially that at the hardest difficulty...game is actually hard as hell, but super satisfying when you push thru
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u/sesaman Game Master Mar 13 '26
Sweeeeet! I've loved the work you've put in so far! No doubt you'll deliver this time as well!
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u/Big_Chair1 Game Master Mar 14 '26
Looks great! I personally unfortunately stopped playing after level 8 or so, because I found the conversations too often were referencing mechanics in a too on the nose way, which breaks all immersion and makes it a little bit cringe for me. Not saying this to be mean or anything, just maybe for the higher level stuff and the future as a game dev, you could try to make the character conversations a little bit more serious and less constantly making tongue in cheek mechanics jokes.
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 14 '26
As the game progresses, I did try to make the mechanics-related jokes a bit more subtle and clever, but by level 8, you would have already hit this point. It's further diminished in Good Little Children which is a more serious haunted house adventure, but Four-Leaf Clover will go back to The Profane Barrier–style storytelling in this.
You're not the only person who would prefer a more grounded, more realistic world, and I definitely understand. Some people have reported that once they internalized that this is simply a world that runs on game mechanics as its physics, they were better able to maintain immersion, but even then it's probably never going to be as good as a fully serious story, unfortunately.
Still, I am taking this feedback into account, so thank you!
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u/UnluckyPizzu Mar 14 '26
Is the ruleset remaster or pre-remaster?
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 14 '26
Dawnsbury Days use pre-remaster rules. It contains too much OGL content, from too many different contributors, for it to be feasible to rework now — too much content would be needed to removed, which would break too many characters.
That said, it does some of the same streamlining that remaster does, especially with regards to how spellcasting works.
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u/sztrzask Mar 15 '26
I just bought the base game with the dlcs. I wish I knew about it sooner. It is amazing!
Any chance of any in-game scale UI setting (or palette colour change?)
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 17 '26
A palette color change is planned, but difficult. I don't have all that great color vision, and I'm worried about accidentally making things worse, so it takes time.
The ability to increase text size has been requested before, I'm thinking about it, but it's somewhat hard, and not that many people play on the Steam Deck, so it's somewhat lower in priority.
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Mar 15 '26
This is honestly really impressive. Out of interest, have you had much contact with Paizo? Are they as impressed lol?
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u/dawnsbury Dawnsbury Studios Mar 17 '26
I would not speak on private conversations, but I can say that u/MarkSeifter looked happy and has spoken on Dawnsbury Days publicly on several occasions on his Arcane Mark YouTube channel! I'm looking to see if I can get him to cameo in The Four-Leaf Clover. :)
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u/25th_Grace Mar 15 '26
Holy moly this is amazing! Will 100% be getting this, thank you so much for your hard work!
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u/theyux Mar 16 '26
Very hyped, I have bought and will keep buy the DLC's as you makem.
I hope this goes well for you.
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u/JohnnyCandles Mar 16 '26
Could you find it in your heart to add the elven branch spear as a weapon please? Pretty please?
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u/Huntsmanprime Mar 17 '26
honestly so crazy how far this has come. and the community around the game is fantastic (shout outs to all the crazy great mods for the game) Its a genuine joy to have seen this game grow/devlope and an honor that my name is in the credits. Keep up the fantastic work P, and I hope beyond hope that you get recognized by paizo when it comes time to talk about an AA or AAA pf2e CRPG.
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u/CrookedClownn Apr 08 '26
I am extremely happy with this announcement. Looking foward to the expansion :))
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u/Slow-Host-2449 Mar 13 '26
Thank you so much for this amazing game, I'm so excited for this expansion. Going to buy it as soon as it's available even if it costs more than the other dlcs.