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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.

It is already optional, but that's not enough.

I'm considering just deleting my prologue level from the game entirely.

My previous game got a lot of criticism and confusion for not tutorializing, so this time I made a tutorial level.  It is the part of the game I have revised and adjusted and fussed over more than any other.  In short, I don't think it was worth the effort.  As far as I can tell, it's not effective as a tutorial, it doesn't represent the real game well, and nobody seems to find it particularly interesting.

If I do that, I will most likely just delete all tutorial messages, or just put them all into a dialogue menu somewhere, since the remaining scraps throughout the rest of the game would no longer have any reason to be there.

I just pushed my 0.7.6 update, which will probably be the last significant update to the demo before release, unless I have to push the release or find something that really can't wait.  Even though I've played through the bulk of the game multiple times now, I keep finding small things that need fixing or tweaking or polishing.  Enemy types that aren't aggressive enough, items that are a little too expensive or too powerful, text that needs cleaning up, treasures that are too obvious.  It's getting there, though.  Very very close.

My focus on playtesting over the past month has been very productive.  Unfortunately, though a handful of people volunteered to playtest, only one actually made it very far.  I consider that phase pretty much over and things aren't going to change much at this point, so I just have to hope I've been thorough enough on my own to get it respectably playable.

Yesterday I completed a playtesting run with no healer.  Being able to complete the game without one of the four primary healing classes was something I have been concerned about for a while, but yes, it's doable, and I didn't really have to change anything to accommodate it.  I had to make optimal use of my skills and I burned through a lot of healing items, but I feel much better about different party compositions being viable, now.

I also used this run to playtest some major changes to the Moon and Hunt classes, which I think perform their intended roles much better now.  Aside from that, I cleaned up or tweaked a few things here and there, and I did redesign a section of one level that I wasn't satisfied with.  I have a few more things that I want to focus playtest, but overall I think it's in a pretty good place right now.

I also released the final dungeon to my one active playtester recently, who completed it last weekend and had pretty positive feedback on the whole.

I am struggling to settle on a release date.  At the beginning of the year I was tentatively targeting Sept. 1st, but that is very close now and I'm nervous about that date, plus I'm planning to join Feedback Quest 8, which runs until Sept. 15th.  October Next Fest starts on Oct. 13th, so it would probably be good to release before then, if I can.  So... I'm thinking mid to late September, maybe?

It's kind of hard to let go of it after all this time, since there is still so much more I could do to improve it, but I really need to release it this year.  It's been long enough, and I am sure I will have more improvements to make after release regardless.

I made it through the Steam approval process, and I can now launch whenever I'm ready.  I still have a lot of playtesting and polish to do, so I'm not ready just yet, but I'm almost there.

What I learned from the approval process is that if there is "mature content" that is not right at the very beginning, Valve will want a level skip and instructions on how to find it, since I guess they want to review your flagged content and make sure you flagged it correctly, or something.  I wish they had told me that up front so that I could have provided it in the first place.  I will have to keep that in mind for my next game.

I actually ended up writing quite a few achievements.  Surprisingly I enjoyed thinking about what moments and accomplishments in the game warranted marking with an achievement, and it was fun coming up with names for them.  This actually motivated me to hide some of the treasures in the game more carefully, so the process of designing achievements actually had a positive impact on gameplay.  I didn't expect that.

So, thoughts on integrating Steamworks with Godot:

• I used the GodotSteam addon, which seems to be the lowest-effort option. If there's another dedicated Godot addon for Steamworks, I didn't find it. Some people with C# projects use Steamworks .net or Facepunch, which are both mainly meant for Unity. I took a look at these, but I have no idea how to get them working in Godot.
• GodotSteam is written for GDScript. There is an addon to the addon that creates C# bindings to the GDS functions, but I had a lot of trouble with it. I eventually gave up using that and tried to call the GDS functions directly from my C# code (which is basically what the bindings addon did anyway), but that actually made it worse.
• Finally, I just scrapped my C# Steam class entirely and rewrote it in GDScript, which I didn't know and have never touched before. Thankfully this wasn't too hard, since all I really need it for is achievements*.  This finally worked. It seems that you HAVE to manipulate the GodotSteam singleton directly in GDScript.  If you try to touch it from C#, it will throw errors or do other frustrating things.
• This still wasn't the end, though. It turns out that GodotSteam is kind of finicky about Linux, for a few reasons, and certain releases just didn't work on my Ubuntu 20.04 install.  Luckily, the 4.14 release still does. This is kind of frustrating since Godot 4.4 itself supports 20.04 and later.

tl;dr: Use GodotSteam and write your Steam access layer in GDScript, but be careful if you're supporting Linux.

* I don't even like or care about achievements, but a lot of people do, so I feel like I ought to include at least a basic set of them. All this, just for that.

Sounds like you have done a lot so far.  What kind of mechanisms are you using for defining and executing events like combat and dialogue and picking up items?  Or are those systems yet to be integrated into the main game loop?

I remember liking Fallout 2 more because it was quite a bit bigger: more equipment, more locations, more side quests and so on (plus better NPC management).  Looking back, though, I can see why it was criticized for being a bit too goofy and inconsistent compared to the first.

I couldn't get into Fallout Tactics at all and I did not like Fallout 3 very much, so I stopped there.

How did you find doing Next Fest?    Did you get a decent bump of wishlists/feedback out of it?

Some of the data was very discouraging, but I don't have previous games to compare and I don't know what's typical for Next Fest, so I should probably not read too much into it.  I did come away with almost triple my small starting number of wishlists.  A couple of people posted mostly positive feedback, with some constructive suggestions and some that I can't do much with.

So, it was worth doing, but without knowing why most people either kept playing or didn't, I don't know much more about what needs improvement.

Next Fest is over and my target release date is coming up sooner than I'd like.  I am finishing up a pretty large QoL update that I have been working on for a few weeks.  Once I push that out, I really need to finish the remaining music tracks so I can get the last dungeon out to my playtesters, then focus on my own playtesting.

Press access to Next Fest is open now and general access starts next week.  This past week, I overhauled all of the music in the demo with (hopefully) improved instrumentation and arrangements, and made some other improvements to audio as well.  I think it's a lot more listenable now, which gives me more confidence in the product, since audio is definitely my weakest skill.  I had really just started playing with some new sound fonts, but since I was able to get a lot better results, I felt like it was important to try to make those improvements in time for Next Fest.  I also did some other last-minute polishing, including some flow improvements to the prologue and revising some pretty old NPC dialogue at HQ.  I'm going to try not to patch it again until after Next Fest for stability's sake, unless an important bug comes up.

Otherwise, I have completed all content implementation and playtested all content in the game, which means that the game is now 100% playable from start to finish.  What's left to do is mainly filling in some missing music tracks and updating a few others, looking over a number of balance and polish items, and doing more playtesting with different party configurations.

I saw that you have a demo available for the sequel, are you interested in detailed feedback on that?  Or are you past the point where that would be helpful?

I do think that using a different font for the sequel would be nice, if it's possible.  The default RPG Maker font is just not very readable, in my opinion.  I realize this would mean a lot of retesting existing dialogues, though, unless you used another monospaced font (which might not be an improvement).

Good point.  The goal is to make the best game I can, not the most money I can (and if making money were the goal, I would not be making what I make).  There is only so much I can do to improve it without feedback; if I can get a little bit more feedback now, instead of 4 months from now, it will be helpful to the final product.

I did end up doing another content pass over the demo levels to add a bit more of interest and make better use of space in a few spots, but there's not a whole lot more I can do.  The first level in particular has kind of a lot of empty space, probably more than what it should have had, but that is just how it was designed.  The first dungeon (the hospital) is represented more as a once-real place that has just been twisted around, as opposed to the later dungeons, where I just do whatever the hell I want, unconstrained by any concerns of what humans might plausibly build.  I think this was partly to make it a bit less hostile as a low-level dungeon, but also because I had something a bit different in mind aesthetically early in development.  The now-optional subway prologue is also not at all representative of how the real game plays, so although in my eyes it does exactly what I wanted it to do, I'm still afraid of it turning people off.  I don't know if just cordoning off the early game was the best choice as a demo, but I also wanted the type of demo that players could start in and then continue playing in the full game.

Completely redoing the first level is not something I am prepared to do right now, so I just have to hope that it's good enough, I guess.  I suspect that I won't get any slack from players for substandard dungeon design.

Currently trying to gauge whether I am actually ready for Next Fest, which is almost here. The more polish I add to the demo, ironically, the less it feels like it's ready, and the less confident I feel that I can hit my original release goal in just a few months.  I'm also not sure if I need to do a significant content-level pass over the demo.  What I have always struggled with is making the early game interesting enough to keep the player going (and interested in playing the full version) without making it too complicated or difficult.  You can't have Mangar's Tower as the first dungeon.

I have to decide pretty quickly if I still want to go through with Next Fest, but I am just having trouble knowing what to make of my current state.