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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.

Spoilers

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:

Spoiler

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

Spoiler

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.

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?