Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you! They actually used to all have the same animations for most of the development but something didn't feel right. So we shifted focus to the character animations instead of making more stages or mechanics or something. We figured that if the characters weren't unique then that's no fun. So we're really glad you enjoyed them!
The characters were really fun to make, Gemby originally had a normal smile but my brother kept insisting I made it bigger and bigger until we ended up with that monstrosity! We really wanted them to look as close as possible to Kyle and LKB's amazing artwork. Some were easier than others. Blackmoon's hair took forever to figure out how to model and Solveig's hair alone took 6 hours just to paint, but DSD was somehow the quickest to make, almost like he made himself...
Also we LOVE Mount Crushmore too! It was the first idea we had and the rest was history ;)