-our animations are in a style (HD pixel) which is uncommon to have experience in compared to normal animation. Therefore, all our animators, both previous and current, have had to learn on the job, regardless of their skill coming in
-team nimbus had to change and bring on new animators multiple times during development. First fuzz, then me, then we had seth til they left, and then we has Rose Valentine until she has to bow out for personal reasons, and then finally, Carbo and Lucid who are still with me. This means that over half of CM's development life was spent with only 1, 1, animator on the job, period, and until this past year, even bringing on help was chaotic at best.
-additionally, all of our animations (combat, overworld, HDs etc) are hand animated, frame by frame. every frame has to be drawn or at LEAST edited using existing assets by hand, which is a very slow process, and labor put into one character does not translate to literally any other animations.
-our HDs are also animated with a level of detail that, like i mentioned before, is more akin to illustrations than animation. there are way more details, both in terms of objects and in term of purple's rendering style, than you would see even professional films deal with
-there are programs that are good for animation, and there are programs that are good for pixels, but there isnt one (to OUR knowledge) that is amazing at both. Aseprite gets the job done but it is very archaic in some ways (i can't even rotate the canvas freely!) and while we've gotten good with it, the program does hold us back to a degree
-if we were to compare our game to another notable 2D game like say, lab zero's indivisible, we dont have a handful of internal animators along with a small army of animation contractors we can outsource the busywork to (thats how LZ gets it done btw! i was one of the busywork animators!). its just us 3, (and sometimes, as mentioned before, it was just me!). and im still the only FULL TIME animator. I work (over) double the hours the other two work.
-And lastly, there are also other jobs that need doing on the project. combat, overworld animations, walk cycles, jumping animations, farming animations, tiny little animations that youll never notice but need to be there so you FEEL them. 80% of the game's dev time has been spent on HDs until the past half a year, mostly due to necessity. HDs have slowed down, but thats because the work on all the other animations thats because the work on all the other animations NEEDS doing in order to make a complete game