Hey grats on the kid, also played the demo and enjoyed a lot of the core stuff.

Main issues with the battle system is me forgetting how to switch targets or not exactly knowing that I was targeting with the heal spell the whole time so I'd sometimes accidentally heal the wrong person. In general though this is the kind of a battle system where I'm not sure if I'm able to avoid getting hit even though it's something you can move around in freely. I get that it's similar to Xenoblade most likely where you're just supposed to take the hit and trade back and forth, but like other semi-action games it'd be nice if that was crystal clear. The only thing worth moving out of the way for seems to be the toxic floor that the snakes leave behind (which the AI likes to roll in like a pig in mud).

I did not know what the hat icon skill does, have no idea. It might help to have some skills freeze time and call out what they do, or to make targeting easier ala Secret of Mana.

The only awkward fights visually I've seen were the jail cell snakes. Didn't realize I could go through the walls and it just generally felt awkward not seeing the snakes. Also there was a section where I was fighting enemies under the UI. Probably best to look into the worst case scenarios.

I really like the flow of the conversations, there's only like two actual cutscenes if I recall and I already got a sense of the story without dropping a beat. The only time I got distracted and missed a story thing was when I was pushing the bookshelf, idk something about noticing a pushable object for the first time took over my focus. But that's really the only time I lost track of the convos. Though this is going to be different for everyone I imagine.

I got stuck on this puzzle and didn't see an easy way to reset it, had to reload a save.

I gave up on the boss, I don't really like baby sitting on the AI to not take in all the hits. Also there's very little warning for when the barrage of slime balls are going to come out, hiding behind the pillars and spamming leap is the only strat I can think of to do but I have difficulty micro managing the two characters to do that. Obviously this is probably going to be the biggest design challenge to tackle: making good party AI. But even something like "keep at a distance and only use range attacks" would be good.

Some technical nitpicky things mostly regarding Game Maker:

Pixels seem really wonky when fullscreened, yet fine in windowed. There's a shimmering effect where the pixels don't quite line up with where they should be. It's extremely noticeable in camera moves. What resolution is that game at? I think it might be that you're not using proper integer scaling (that it doesn't fully fit into a 1920x1080 thing, but I'm not sure, eyeballing it... it seems like a 720p scaled up 3x in windowed mode which seems weird since the width would have to be something like 426.6.

AI following you seems... weird, are you using mp_potential at all? I tend to make a grid out of collision tiles and have the AI go on a path to avoid obstacles and reach the player and it works really well. I mostly derived what I know from this tutorial and it seems to work better than other methods I've tried. mp_potential_step is a bit of a blackbox though, but there's enough to work around to make it useful.

The camera sometimes juts forward in random spots. I don't know what would cause it.

Maybe I'm used to RPGMaker at this point but I really like having confirm/cancel be on the Z and X keys as an option. I like the WASD + arrow key setup for battles so having Z and X under it would work better I think.