Ok I hate to be the guy whos's like "Um akshully it's quite simple
", but wouldn't estimating how much effort it takes to make a smash character actually be kinda easy? Like, it's not witchcraft, theres plenty of information on general game development.
Every character has a 3d model. There's tons of 3d modelers out there, i dont think it would be that difficult to find information online on how much time it would take to model a character at a given level of complexity.
You can just count how many seconds of animation a character has. I remember hearing somewhere that a professional animator can make 6 seconds of animation a day, but I cant remember if that was for a single character or a whole scene.
You do have to program the characters, but they have to have that down to a science by now after making 80 of them. Programming characters has to be more like filling out a spreadsheet, i just have a hard time believing they regularly run into novel programming roadblocks. Even steve sounds like he was more
tedious to program than actually difficult.
Designing them probably is the hardest to estimate since it's purely creative and we wouldnt entirely know the kinds of things sakurai has to consider. I think the only time he gave an answer to how long it take to design a character is when he said he came up with greninja's moveset in a day. So it probably takes at most a couple weeks.
Then you have to add the beurocrasy- approving the animations, approving the models, approving the sound effects, getting approval from the licenses, so on and so forth. Gonna be real this is probably like half of development time.
It's easy to
explain what needs to be done, it's not quite as a simple to sit down and work through it. You can tell a painter what you want a picture of, and how to paint it, but actually making the painting takes time.
Just because programmers know how to program and animators know how to animate doesn't mean it's not still a time-consuming process. The difficulty isn't in figuring out how to do their job, these are professionals, it's going through the effort of creating it.
They're not animating a movie, it has to do more than look good; the animations have to correspond to the gameplay down to exact frames. Count how many unique frames each character has, including using items, and with all statuses. Don't forget all the effects, either. Now add stages, bosses, items, ATs, Pokemon, etc. which also all have animations. The team may be skilled, but there's a lot to do. And just because an animation is finished doesn't mean it won't necessarily get reworked based on feedback from the testers or the license holders.
The gameplay has to be programmed and tested, across the entire cast, on every stage, on all modes, with all items and with modifiers like spirits. And not just how characters function, but how characters
think with the CPUs, across all the difficulties. Thousands of alterations will need to be made over the course of development that trickle to every branch of the team - artists, animators, designers, audio, testers, programmers - which then need to be coordinated back through producers and again subject to QA.
And just because programmers know how to program doesn't mean there won't be instances where something in the code is causing trouble, and they can't even identify where exactly the hurdle is. The last few months of development before launch is usually primarily debugging, because of how many there end up being. Not to mention fixing one thing in the code can cascade into other problems. No doubt they're capable programmers, but these problems inherently arise during development.
Meanwhile all of this is happening with each universe coming with its own mandates, the models and animations have to be approved by the license holders, the character's kit should be viable and interesting, which requires designers, testers, and programmers. Everything needs to be able to run as intended across every possible variation to the game, which in Smash... are a lot of possible variations. It's certainly not just 1v1, items off in VS mode.
And all the while, you have a perfectionist boss who no doubt exerts some form of micromanaging on you, and is probably not the easiest guy to satisfy.
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