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

[Antiquity]

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.

[Antiquity]

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.

[Antiquity]

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.

[Jubal]

Hm, yeah, the tutorialising question is pretty tricky. :/ In my last game I had a separated tutorial map with some tutorial messages & a quest to do, and I think 75% of people just skipped it.

Is the prologue currently optional/might it work to make it optional?

[Antiquity]

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

[Antiquity]

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.