MRY
Wormwood Studios
Vault Dweller: Perhaps the last piece of advice in the world you need to hear is, "Don't rush it," but all the same, I will say from my experience with Primordia that you are cutting it fairly close in terms of testing. The last parts of Primordia to go in came out pretty poorly until a months-later patch. In some ways, AGS is a much harder development engine to test (and patch) than what you're using, and I know you've been testing as you go, but AOD is orders of magnitude more complex than Primordia was.We’re planning to release the final location by the end of August. At that point the game will be content-complete. We’ll test, tweak, and polish through September and early October (so far we’ve allocated 6 weeks) and release.
One problem that you may face (similar to ours with Primordia, which is that each new iteration broke all saves, meaning that testers had to start over from the beginning to test the end game content, and grew increasingly jaded/worn out) is that the last content you put in, to be tested "in context," may require playing the game from start to finish. That will take time with AOD.
Since all I know about the game is from snippets I've read here and there, I may be wrong, but it seems like a really fundamental aspect of the game is how the parts cohere. With every patch update, it seems like things you've added have reopened questions about earlier areas, how to foreshadow later developments, how to have different areas interact or at least to have later areas react to earlier choices (which sometimes may mean adding earlier choices). If I'm right, this is a key part of the process, but one that will be sorely tempting to rush through: like not letting meat sit for juices to reabsorb before you carve ("It's right there! It's cooked! FFS, let's eat!") or pick your metaphor.
Anyway, my long-winded two cents. Since AOD may be the first RPG in a decade that I actually drag my weary carcass to play, I hope for the best.