Hey all, Matthew here.
First of all, I should say that the demo will be releasing tomorrow!
(or, well... later today technically.)
It'll contain all of Chapter 1 (and a tiny bit more) and will be updated to contain Chapter 1.5 in the future.

But besides that, we're sorry to say but the game is gonna slow down in production for a bit.
Trust me though, it's not for a stupid reason. You see, this game's been in production for about 2-3 years, and all we have to show for it is a 3 hour demo!? Well, no and yes. Currently, the game is... mostly completed up to Chapter 3, and that's when the original demo was gonna end. However, there was one big issue with the game: it sucked. Cutscenes lacked fluidity, graphics may or may not have been Mother 3 recolors, and some of those issues persist even in this version. Chapter 3 has been finished for 2 of these 3 years. What's been happening in that time? Polish.
Originally, the game was much shorter and had a much less smooth pace. The story we wanted to tell wasn't gonna be compact enough to be dumped on the player in Chapters 4-9, and we knew that the later chapters were gonna be much beefier than the first 3, so to compensate we went back and fixed up the game. This part isn't what took 2 years, working in RPG Maker 2003 is what took 2 years.
As you can see from the screenshots, there's not just wandering around until you reach the next cutscene. We got things like platforming, puzzles, overworld battles, and a lot of things not common in RPG Maker 2003 games. I'm gonna level with you here: these sucked to make. The turtles alone took what, 3 months? 2003 has no access to scripts (unless I'd want to download dynRPG, which I don't as it outdates the game version) and not much support in terms of the wackier stuff you can do with it. It's literally became an inside joke of ours that "if this was VX Ace it'd be possible." Worst part is, even after we managed to pull it off, it still feels like jank. Long story short, the grid based movement works for the Jump Pad puzzles to come later in Chapter 2, pretty much nothing else though.

So, what's our solution to this problem?
Simple! We're moving to VX Ace!

Yeah, it'll suck to have to remake the whole game again (and learn Ruby for that matter) but at this point, I legitimately think it'd be quicker than trying to make the rest of the game in 2003, especially since most of this time has been spent fixing up stupid things. Friendly reminder: I began working on this game when I was 14, and this was my first project.
It's been a long journey, and it's only gonna get longer from here. If you're reading this, thanks for stickin' with us up to this point.