First off, Churn Vector is a great game, and if you only have $15 and like CV I'd recommend that game over ours.
Of the 18-month development time, about 12 months went straight into animations. The game has a total of roughly 50 minutes of custom animations (if you were to play every animation end-to-end). That said, in a normal playthrough, you’d only see about 20 minutes of them, as many are blended together, cut short by player input, or vary based on minigame paths (e.g., winning, losing, or mixed outcomes trigger different animations).
You’re right—There are more things we could have done to improve certain aspects of the models. Like with the hands sometimes hovering over the bellies, that is because the IK handles have to be animated to where the custom shader distends the mesh to. Stacking multiple things together ended up causing a ton of issues that started getting in the way of new animated scenes. There was work done on a deformation shader that made the belly indent around arms and hands but it conflicted with how struggles morph the belly and would have required substantial reworking the meshes to have a higher topology around the stomach areas.
As it stood, the 'team' was just me. Kudalyn provided the 3D models and wore the mocap gear for recording, but beyond that, I had to handle everything else—integrating, refining, and implementing it all. So I often had to try and 'keep moving' in order for tangible progress to be made during development (Working for the Patrons often motivates new content over refining old content).
Think the one thing I'd do differently is put the game at $10 instead of $15. Maybe once we start work on the next project I'll drop it down by $5 and it will be a better value.
Also, performance should be pretty good, had to implement a fix as some players were running into issues if the game started running over 500+ fps. If you don't mind sharing your specs that might help us track down what might be causing it.