Minerva Labyrinth - A dark magical girl dungeon crawler

[Jubal]

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

[Antiquity]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

FWIW this sounds very similar to my Next Fest experience. I had quite a bit of information on e.g. how quickly people stopped playing (fast) and how many downloads (which felt like a better number) but not much feel for how they played, which I think is a tricky one. Indeed I think a lot of DLs for the Exile Princes - circa 10-15 percent of them - are done by achievement-hackers who just load up the free game and use a hack to give themselves all the Steam achievements, which is a bit of a glum statistic.

But it's always hard to know how a game looks in practice to your users. Bigosaur, a dev who comes here occasionally, once said to me that he feels there's no substitute for just watching people do playthroughs physically or via videos sometimes, which may have something to it.

[Antiquity]

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.

[Antiquity]

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.

[Jubal]

The mature content stuff on Steam is weird, especially as I know a lot of people slightly under-rate their games for it to aid visibility.

I quite liked designing achievements for my game, but that's just because I like coming up with really bad or obscure references and puns to name them all