Re: monetization, there's this weird tightrope to walk between monetization and exposure. Monetization helps you get the capital to devote more time to developing stuff, but it also limits exposure, and exposure is what you need to really benefit from monetization.

To that end, maybe the best thing to do is to keep the game as open as you can during most of development while you build an audience, and then close things off towards the end of development, so some content stays a secret until release.

I'd definitely recommend putting out a demo later in the process, and it may be worth Kickstarting too--but only once you've got 99% of the game ready. Basically, use the Kickstarter to leverage additional funds/market a complete product. Kickstarter audiences, I think, are pretty shy of CRPGs from indie studious, in part because of how easy those things can turn to vaporware and in part because of how long of a time-lag there is between backing and production. A late-in-the-development-cycle Kickstarter avoids those two issues.

Also, as a roguelike, you're gonna want lots of testing. I feel like there's more weird interactions/things that can go wrong in a roguelike than in a conventional rpg, and having the game be available to play during most of the development process means more potential people to catch those issues before release.

Edit: also, I really like the cast. Having different characters with different approaches to the fort will make a big difference in playability.

2nd Edit: Also, I had an idea the other day re: the coin flip mechanic. There's a tabletop game called Trail of Cthulhu that has sort of a Fear and Hunger-y vibe to it, in that it's about managing scarcity. Instead of its Skills being raw numbers, they're pools. You can spend from those pools to boost your chances of succeeding on something, but then you have that less in the pool to work with later when things get really bad.

Having a few skill pools seems like it could be a way to buffer the coin flip AND deeper integrate the Fear and Hunger meters. For example, let's say the Dark Priest has a Lore pool of 2/2. The Dark Priest opens a bookshelf and gets the option to flip a coin OR spend a point of Lore. He spends and goes down to 1/2 Lore. He draws the Necronomicon from the shelf and opens it up. He gets another choice to flip a coin or spend Lore. He decides to flip a coin, gets tails, and is devoured. On the other hand, if he had spent that point of Lore, it would have left him at 0/2 Lore, and any further encounters with bookshelves or chanting priests, he would have had to take the coin flip until he found an item or circumstance that let him refresh his pool.

Other skills could be things like Melee (to spend vs. the Guard's grab move) or Trap Sense (to spend vs. that hole in the floor), or whatever seems most viable for the setting, and each character would get one or two, but not all. So there would be some circumstances in which each character would still be exceptionally vulnerable.

On top of that, you could make Fear and Hunger into pools (which they sort of already are), allowing players to better manage them.

3rd Edit: This would also let you have abilities that cost something other than your Fear meter.

@kumada, Yes, that's pretty much the strategy I was thinking about. But I really don't know yet. I might just leave it as a free game and put up some Patreon or something... meh, it's too early to think such things. The game hardly has enough visibility for stuff like that anyway. I've just noticed now that this is not just a school project anymore, I'm struggling to find time for the project. I've just been too busy with work and stuff. :/ normal life problems lol

That idea about pools is an interesting one. I really need to think about that! One idea I had was that gods could help you out in coin tosses if you had a good relationship to them. God alignments could work like pools I suppose. You could do favors like sacrifices and love making to honor them, or pray the correct god against correct statue to fill up the pools. But I also like your idea how skills could be tied to pools too ... hm..

Yes absolutely I'm planning on having negative effects too. They might form up to be faction-like element in the game, where pleasing one might displease the other. Although lore-wise all the older gods are pretty independent and the real clash between the gods is between older and new gods.

I'm pretty much on the same page with the pools-idea :D I was planning something like this already, as you can pray different gods on different shrines in the demo, but I didn't consider it affecting the coin toss. I guess I was a bit stuck with the idea that a coin toss is a coin toss - a 50-50 chance, nothing more, nothing less. In the end the coin toss is like placing your fate onto the hands of a higher power, so it's pretty natural that the better your relationship with this higher power is, the better your chances get. And like you said, limited pools are a good way to keep the danger and loss in the coin toss!