So my question is what do I need to consider here?
You need to consider that users are notorious for not rating and not commenting. So even if you do everything "correct", there might not be as much feedback as you hope for.
Look at games similar to your own, and how many comments they have on average. Look for works in progress. That's what you might expect. Also, there might be hints, how they might have gathered an audience in the target group.
For feedback you need people that play your game. Getting people to play your game is hard. Even if you have people playing, they might not bother to give feedback, even if asked.
For specific things you might get an answer in this community, but just scroll down and you will see that half the threads here have zero answers. It is not much better on actual game pages.
Your approach to listen to feedback is good on paper. But there are two issues, imho.
Getting known. This is the problem all new developers have. How to build an audience. There is no easy answer to that. If it were easy, everybody would do it, and everybody would be at square 1 again. There are several threads about this, maybe they can give you inspiration. Once you have an audience, asking the audience what they like about your game is a good idea, I think.
And the law of small numbers. You might get 1 honest and helpful feedback per 100 followers. Just read comments on games, look how much followers the account has and what is going on in the comment section. So if your selection of feedback is a small number, like < 10, you can't be sure if this is actually helpful feedback. The majority of your fans might think differently, but did not speak up. Sometimes people ask for features, but those features might alienate your actual target audience. Or they complain about a specific thing, but in truth the majority of players like the game because of that thing.
In my opinion, for the indie sector, just make a game that is fun for you to make. There is enough diversity in game topics that there might be an audience for whatever game you want to make. The problem is bringing that game to that audience's attention ;-)
Or I thought it was. Where do the devlogs show up? Either way here is the project page https://floaty-42.itch.io/warg
I am not sure if all devlogs show up. It might be that the devlog section is only some of them.
They might appear in the feed.
https://itch.io/feed?filter=posts
Your project is hidden, so they probably will not show up.
I am not aware of any sorting/demotion by release status. Oh, you can filter by it, but if you hit https://itch.io/games the games in that list are all games, from prototype to released and even cancelled games.
If you have a closed beta or something like that, you might want to have restricted access.
But as soon as you are ready to face the public opinion of whomever stumbles upon your page, or whoever visits because of your promotion, you can publish your project.
Can I make it public without publishing and showcase the progress?
I do not understand this sentence. It make no sense to me. Itch does not have publishing/release dates as Steam has them. You can't showcase a thing, that no one can see. And you can't have public feedback, if a thing is not public. If you wanna do a closed beta test, that is a different thing.
But sure, you can talk about some things in regular community threads, without publishing a thing. But the old devlogs are deprecated. The way to do this, is to publish a prototype and maybe create devlogs about that project. But all this ties in with what I wrote earlier: you need to have an audience to get feedback.
Maybe make a side project and join a game jam.
