Replying for anyone who hasn't seen:
The devs relesed a (public) post on SubscribeStar mentioning how it might need a few more days to get ready. There's also some more dev behind-the-scenes stuff talk if anyone's interested.
(I won't link the post directly because there's enough weird links in comments as is but their SS is already linked on the page so you can see it there)
VirtMTTR
Recent community posts
Late reply but the game's page features characters mostly to look forward to as the game continues to update as you can see with most of the sketched designs. We'll see them pop up eventually but it will likely take some time.
As for Boulder, they'll be in the next Patreon update so for public builds, we'll get to meet him next-next update.
Glad to see you guys planning ahead for the better of your projects. I know changing engines has been rough for others, so I wish you luck!
As for the character sprite size change, I'm not too much of a fan personally, primarily because the head looks very disproportionate right now and ends up looking a bit too uncanny.
The single-tile sprites make things much easier to scale and navigate because since everything is consistently the same size, it's easy to figure out the hitbox or what pathways I'm allowed to go through. I actually had a few moments already struggling to find out what paths I'm allowed on sometimes.
Changing this to a bigger sprite might lead to a lot more tweaking with some of the maps, cutscenes, etc. as well as room for potential clipping through tilesets. I'm worried this might slow progress as this would mean checking almost every room for this issue.
This is a more personal note the smaller sprites allow more room to interpret actions or expressions. With a bigger sprite, those types of actions may end up feeling a bit clunkier. The consistent 1x1 tile sprites kind of force you to use your imagination to picture scales of certain characters or how they're reacting, if that makes sense.
At the end of the day, you guys still decide what you think is best for the project but my opinion on it is that it should stay as the smaller sprites.
Something else would be the combat options being on the right. Your eyes are likely to want to focus on Grove (either for armor or grapple CGs) so it would be preferred if the options were on the left so you can keep an eye on the action and to make the flow of reading the text and actions much easier. Keeping it on the right would be a bit of an inconvenience, but maybe that's more the fault of the engine itself so I'm not sure if you're able to change that.
REGARDLESS, I'm still very excited about this news and how this will allow you and the team to make this game. Prowler's features have shown everyone capable of so much more when given more tools so I'm looking forward to how all this can boost Grove's potential.
Edit: I noticed in the new battle sprite preview, I noticed Grove is missing his tail! Thought I'd let you guys know!
I can't say how long exactly it will be but you can see the plan for what's to come here in this public post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/flaming-flagon-100566644
It should give you a better scope of the project-- though of course there are obviously some spoilers of upcoming stuff so read as you will.