I found a small mood board in Ollie’s website featuring games and images with art styles similar to what he had in mind for Backchat. Two of these games were Wednesdays and Omori.
Both of these games have a somewhat sketchy and stylised art style, however they do differ in colour schemes direction. Wednesdays tends to have different colour schemes according to the scenes but it does have an overarching colour scheme of pink and blue, whereas Omori has less frequent non-pixel artworks and when we get them, they are following a specific fantastical colour palette of purple and turquoise when in the headspace, or a realistic less fantastical colour palette when in the real world, but quite dark blue when at night time.
(The first 4 are Wednesdays, the remaining five are Omori)
I decided I was going to more closely reference Omori for the characters art style mixed with my own, and Wednesdays for the background art.
There is also artwork and screenshots which are more painterly and abstract and more focused on shapes.
I decided I was going to try making a mood board around all of this.
Animation style inspiration: