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Thank you!  It feels strange to release something that I have been working on for so long.  Almost five years, off and on.  I'm eager to start working on a new dungeon crawler, which hopefully will not take quite so long to finish.

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Looking forward to Barbara Gaiden.  I used the hairpin to get out of jail.  I didn't find the secret passage, but I saved the dog, got the Blancmange spell, and planted the sunflower at home.

I gave Adele the counterattack accessory most of the time to use with her taunt skill (this helped a lot with the escape fight in particular) and gave everyone else Fit Bits.  The castle was pretty short actually, I was expecting it to be longer, so I over-prepared quite a bit before entering.  I never sold the other ancient wine since I wasn't sure if it would have another use.

Just pushed the really definitely final (barring catastrophe) launch version and got everything set up for release.  There's more that I want to do, but it can wait a little while.  If I happen to get any feedback from players, that will help me know better what to focus on.  For now, it's time to just leave it alone for a few days and do something else.  I spent a while yesterday playing some indie games (including EntangledPear's TSFTAMO) and leaving feedback/reviews, something I haven't been able to do much of during this ten-month development crunch.

My goal at the beginning of the year was to release it in 2025.  That ended up being really hard, because the game turned out to need a lot more refinement and tuning than I anticipated.  All of that has served to make it a better game, but I haven't done very much else with my free time all year.

I probably put too much pressure on myself, because nobody would have died if I had pushed it to 2026, but I was adamant about not doing that.  Five years is long enough to hold onto this project.  I'm excited to release it, but I am also ready to let it go and start thinking about my next project.

Finished!  My time was about 12:30 at levels 27-28.  The final boss wasn't too bad.  I liked the ending.  Barbara was my favorite character.

I don't have too much to add to what I've said before, but it's overall a nice solid adventure that's not too long or difficult.  The investigative elements, attention to detail in the world, and basis in real-world fairytales are some of the distinguishing aspects that I enjoyed.  The latter especially gives it a particular sort of vibe; I am probably not familiar with most of the stories referenced in the game, but old fairytales have a specific kind of oddness about them, and this felt authentic to that (the subplot about the rock king especially sounded like a real-world story).  Another game that gave me similar vibes in that respect was Operencia, another RPG based on European folklore, especially Hungarian I think, although I don't know what else they might have pulled from.  Incidentally, in that one, you also have to bring sunlight back to the land.  Was that inspired by a specific story?

About that point of no return again:

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I was thinking that an easy way to improve this (should you decide to do so) would be to just set it on first entering the tower, instead of after talking to the witch.  The characters can give a warning before entering that they won't be leaving after this point.  This way, it is clearly telegraphed to the player, and you don't have to add new dialogue to all the NPCs.

Also, I forgot that there were both Spanish flies and fly agaric.  I never found fly agaric, either.  I checked the guide on your Itch page and it says they are mushrooms from Death's forest?  I never noticed that there were mushrooms to collect there.

Something that I've been thinking about from the beginning is: how far should I go to make the game beatable with as many party builds as possible, while still being at least somewhat challenging for more optimal builds?  Being able to grind up levels helps with this, but you can only get so powerful.  The last boss especially is rather demanding.  I may have to raise the level cap to allow a bit more headroom at the end of the game.  I've never had to reach the current cap to finish the game, though, even with a party with no healers.

I'm currently attempting to play through with five Life characters, which is a bit like a 4x white mage run in Final Fantasy.  My rules are a bit more flexible than that, so I've built to try to put out as much damage as I can without any offensive skills.  I'm not sure that I can actually finish the game like this, but if I can, it still doesn't prove that all builds are winnable, or even that all 5x Life builds are winnable.

I do not want to add respec options, partly for story reasons and partly because I really want your party build to be what you play from start to finish, FF1-style, with all the ups and downs that come from matching a particular build against the game's various challenges.  The default party is fully capable of winning the game, and there are ample warnings at character creation if your party is missing certain capabilities.  Maybe that's enough?

I'm still in crunch mode on my own game, so I haven't been able to finish just yet, but I will soon.

I forgot about the flies.  That mystified me since I couldn't find them anywhere, but I had resolved to just move on without it.  Good to know that I won't need it.

I don't think a third meditation is necessary, I just wondered if I had missed it.  It's fine to have it only available twice so that you have to choose who gets it.

Looks like November 5th is the date.  It's about as ready as it's going to get, I think.  Just doing a final pass over everything.

I haven't gotten to finish just yet, but I did complete the northernmost area and should be ready to move on next time I play.  In the mean time, I left you a rating on Itch.

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I thought the consequences for banishing Death and having to bring it back were interesting.  Lots of games have Death as just a regular boss, but literally defeating Death would probably have an impact on the world.  I also appreciated the affable dragon and peaceful witch that didn't need to be slain as a first resort, which is also in keeping with Paul's character.

The point of no return took me by surprise, although fortunately I had a save file from right before it.  The fact that you can't return once you teleport into the castle is very clearly telegraphed, but it isn't obvious at all that you can't leave the witch's tower.  It's especially odd since the alchemist asks for various items from outside the tower, which I did not have and then could not go and get.  This is a weird trap for the player and doesn't feel necessary.

So, I reloaded my game from right outside the tower, and went around to finish up everything that I hadn't done yet.  I wasn't able to procure any spices, since the spice merchant is gone, so I am hoping that they won't be required to finish the game.  I'm pretty sure the spice merchant was a long while back at this point.

Speaking of which, I was curious about something.  I found two ancient wines in the castle, which I noticed sold for 30,000 gold, but I held onto them.  I later traded one for the brandy.  If the player just sells both of these, it's enough to buy the brandy, but what if the player does so and still runs out of money by this point?  It's no longer possible to grind for gold, because enemies don't die.  Is there an alternate solution, or would farming and selling mushrooms/gallows dew/etc. be the only renewable source of income at this point?

I also wondered about the meditation.  I did this with Paul at the beginning of the game, then returned every so often to see if I could do it again, but I couldn't until where I'm at right now.  I gave it to Adele this time, but is it possible to meditate a third time to cover all characters?  What determines when it refreshes?

Leave it at base: the player's base location is something I want to be a fairly core game element, and I'm thinking that once you unlock the stash I might let players magic-pockets things to the stash location quite easily, so you should need to go to base to kit yourself out but you're never hampered in gathering/looting in that you can then just send a bunch of stuff to stash and keep on with the current activity.

So, would that mean that when you enter a town, you have to stash all of your weapons, but when you leave, you can't take them back out?

I kind of like the idea that the storage might have some different types of slot, so maybe e.g. you can carry a certain number of large items and a certain number of small items, but these aren't interchangeable (which has some logic: if you choose not to bring your sword, it's a bit impractical to just assume you're then going to fill the scabbard with mushrooms you picked up).

OK, but if a sword counts as a large item, does that mean that I could put a spare suit of armor in the scabbard instead?  This sounds complicated.

(one mechanic I'm thinking about for example is that if you want to do violence in an urban area, you might be better carrying a working tool which the guards won't bat an eyelid at than hauling around a great big glaive).

What would you do with the glaive when you walk into town?

One thing on Antiquity's annoyance list that I think might be necessary for me is only unlocking the stash after the relevant quest is completed: I don't see how it would logically make sense for the PC to be able to send things to base before they have a base. But also, that is in my mental schema one of the first block of quests to unlock after the intro, so I can probably just restrict how much you get to pick up early on and maybe give players a dialogue nudge that if they want storage, they should prioritise getting the base? Or maybe it means I need to railroad getting the base first but I'd rather leave it more open.

There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that, a lot of RPGs have done something similar (the car in Fallout 2 or the castle in Might and Magic VII, for example).  The problem with Grim Dawn is that it is the exact type of game that shouldn't do that: an overcomplicated loot-clicker with a heavy focus on playing multiple characters and class builds.

Regarding grids versus lists: I do see how lists take more scrolling. I don't hugely want to make a static grid that ends up with lots of gaps in it: is an auto-sorted grid view something people would have any problems with?

The benefit of a grid of icons is that you can quickly identify things visually, but the downside is that you can't quickly identify them by name.  Even auto-sorted, this is probably only a net plus if the inventory is relatively small.  When I used to play Everquest 2, finding anything in my inventory of several hundred slots was a nightmare.

[know]

In my opinion, most RPGs don't benefit from limited inventory space.  I think this is probably a holdover from ancient RPGs where memory was at a premium, so inventory was sharply limited just because the game could only keep track of so much.  If I want to haul all of the loot out of the dungeon, then I will find a way to do it. Limiting my bag space just means that I have to make multiple trips, and that doesn't accomplish anything except wasting my time.

Fully agree with Spritelady about the Tetris grid.  It reminds me of one of the worst inventory management games I have played in recent memory, Grim Dawn, which used this type of system.  What made it so much worse than most is:

• Equipment tends to have very steep stat requirements, so there was a lot of stuff that I held onto just because I couldn't use it yet.
• Pursuant to that, there was also a lot of stuff that I wasn't actively using, but still held onto because it had significant stat bonuses that could help me equip other items.
• Items take up anywhere from 1 to like 8-10 grid squares, and your inventory has multiple pages. Try finding the 1x1 amulet you're looking for in that mess.
• Resistances are pretty important, and there are A LOT of resistances.  Like eight different types, I think, so I'm stockpiling aether resistance gear and bleeding resistance gear and so on.
• You have a "stash" like in Diablo 2, including a shared stash, but a new character cannot access it until they complete the first quest chain, which takes, I dunno, an hour or two?  I know that they did this on purpose just to hinder people creating bank characters.  Why are they so petty about this?
• As is generally the fashion in Diablo 2 clones (but which was actually not the case in Diablo 1), there is an absolute ton of loot, which means there is a lot to go through to see if any of it's worth using (usually not), multiplied by the fact that there are so many resistances to keep track of and so much banked gear and no free space for anything new, which in turn means A LOT OF TIME spent messing with your inventory and teleporting to town and back to figure it all out.

This is a huge hassle.  I literally quit playing that game because of inventory.  I think the last straw was when I completed a mini dungeon that had like eight treasure chests at the end, which took me forever to sort through, only to end up with nothing but vendor trash (and items don't even sell for very much).

Speaking of Diablo and inventory, people forget that Diablo 1 had effectively unlimited storage in single-player.  Anything that you dropped on the ground would stay there forever.  But since Diablo 2 redesigned the engine around multiplayer and non-persistence, it introduced the stash as a poor workaround, and now that is a standard "feature" in that subgenre of games.

Limited inventory can potentially work in certain design circumstances, like if you want to limit how many healing potions a player can bring into combat, or if you have a run-based game and have to decide what supplies to bring with you, what loot to keep, and what to leave behind.  Darkest Dungeon did this for example, but even there, it was extremely irritating in practice (why does one little gemstone take up as much space as camping equipment for four people?).

Atelier is a better example of inventory limits, I think, although how they implement inventory and item use varies a lot between games.  Most of them are based around crafting and time management, so you have to weigh how many bombs and potions and such you want to bring with you vs. how many gathered materials you want to haul out vs. how much time it will take you to travel there and back.  When fighting the optional superbosses, you need every single inventory slot for consumables, and you need to figure out the right balance of which ones you need, so that you can kill the boss before you run out of supplies.  On the other hand, in most of the games, you have nearly unlimited storage space in town to store all of your many many MANY crafting materials, and when you craft an item, it filters the required components so that you only have to look through what is actually needed.

You're right about the Black Castle dungeon, in a way we wanted to give a chance to gain experience before the boss, but it is quite long.

I guess that's fair.  I did gain a few (3?) levels on the way up, which was not nearly enough to defeat the boss, but it was enough that I could then take the mirror shortcut back down, buy all of the remaining equipment upgrades, and start leveling on werewolves.  These give a lot more XP and gold than the castle enemies.

I did finally win after grinding up to the low 20s:

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Barbara doesn't learn Assassin's Edge until 20, so I didn't even have that yet on my first attempts, and it ended up being absolutely required.  I brought along some magic booster potions (cursed bones have an annoyingly low drop rate, btw) to improve magic defense, which didn't make a huge difference, but they helped.  I kept Barbara's attack buffed with Breath Weapon or bravery potions and just kept her focused on the boss.  I did see that Thief's Luck boosts Assassin's Edge, but I ended up just spending her TP on Edge.  Adele was almost exclusively healing or dispelling the defense buff on the boss.  Paul couldn't do anything at all to the boss, so I just had him clearing the zombies or using healing potions.  I just ignored the rot, it wasn't worth spending a turn to cure it.

I should have grinded up just one more level first, though.  After I won, Adele made level 22 and learned Heal II, which would have helped a lot during the fight.

I'll have to think about the battle animations - again, for this game, only for some kind of anniversary updated version, but more for the one we're working on, which might have the same problem. It never bothered me when I playtested, but I had someone else mention it, too, so I should keep it in mind.

It's not the individual animations per se.  Those are fine, but combat as a whole just kind of runs slowly, because there are a lot of delays between turns or when resolving damage.  I don't know how much control you have over this, but any way to speed it up would be helpful.

I could really use a break from my year-long crunch, so I finally gave this a go today.  I like it!  I like how you need to gather clues and talk to people in order to know how to advance.  There is also a lot of attention paid to making it feel like an actual world.  Rather than just wandering nobodies, towns have people with different jobs like crier or blacksmith, many of whom you can talk to about your various current leads.  Shops and houses extend beyond their public front and the protagonist won't rudely wander through them.  It seems like you also spent a lot of time decorating areas; you did a good job of making them detailed without being noisy.

The weak point mechanic is an interesting idea, but I haven't really used it much.  If I need Paul to contribute damage, magic is generally more effective; using weak point vs. a standard attack is kind of moot in most combats.

I made it to

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the top of the Black Castle, but the Black Lady is handing my head to me.  I figured out that only non-magical weapons can damage her, but I can't keep up with her spell damage and summons.

I'm around level 19.  I'm not sure if I'm missing a clue somewhere, or if I just need to grind werewolves for a while or maybe bring some buff potions.  I'll probably do that, since I don't have any other leads on what to do next.

You may have gotten slightly carried away with that dungeon.  It's gigantic, and every step of the way is spent searching boxes and dressers and such.  The shortcuts between floors seem arbitrarily placed, so I didn't really use them.  I'm sure I missed some treasure, but hopefully it's nothing important, because I don't really want to comb through the whole place a second time.  It's a cool dungeon with lots of neat flavor text, it's just very long.

Other than that, my only real complaint is that I wish there was a way to speed up combat animations.  Combat against even weak enemies can be pretty slow to resolve, so I usually just flee if they're not worth much.

I have cut down the last level a bit to make it less time-consuming and confusing, but I am still not sure about it.  I will need to playtest it again.  Then I need to do another music pass, then hopefully by then I will have a bit more feedback from FBQ with regards to the overhauled tutorial to see what needs additional work.  These are the things that I feel like I absolutely must do before it's ready.  I should probably also install a different Linux distro on my newer laptop for additional testing.  I'm not happy about throwing things out and redoing them like this when I'm already past my original release goal, but it was needed.

The problem with setting a release date is that Steam won't let me change it less than two weeks out.  I feel like I need to be absolutely sure it's ready, and then set the date for two weeks from then.

I kept the subway for now, but I deleted the tutorial feature entirely and cut almost all of the opening dialogue.

I added some basic button prompts at the top of the screen during that section.  All explanations of how mechanics actually work that was not already part of the help screen has been moved into a kiosk in HQ.  I have divided it into selectable topics for which I write exactly as much as I want, and no less.

I disclaim any more responsibility for trying to gently teach how the game works.  Anything beyond the basic movement and interaction controls is up to the player to seek out when they're ready to understand it.  As it was for decades before tutorials became the norm.

The next thing I have to deal with is the music.  I have a mind to just delete that entirely, as well.  At the very least, certain tracks, like the very first one in the game for example, just need to be scrapped.  I'll have to come up with some more inoffensive droning that won't be so hard to listen to.