We realised that none of our roles really aligned with background art, so I decided to take it on as character artists because I already felt like my workload was pretty low as I only had 4 characters to draw without faces.
After Cindy wrote a simple script of what happens on day one, I was able to note what locations I would need to draw.
Classroom, Cafeteria, Library (was mentioned but is not in day 1 script), School Gate, Playground.
From this I began looking at references. During my search I realised that I was not sure what country the game was set in. My first assumption was the UK, however it doesn’t specify in the GDD, so I decided I was going to merge well-known, mainstream + personally familiar classrooms. So japanese classrooms because a lot of anime tends to be set in Japan and American classrooms because they’re what comes to mind when I think about high school, and british classrooms because we are currently in britain.
However I didn’t just reference those, I looked at references from japan, korea, china, america and england on pinterest and saved the images I liked.
In all of the images I found, there was a common denominator in all classrooms except for the UK, each desk is separated for each student, whereas England tends to have larger desks attached together to fit more students, possibly to encourage communication and teamwork, however I am aware that usually in all classrooms the desks will be joined together unless there’s an exam. I decided that I will have joined together desks in the classroom background.
Also all of the classroom have a lot of educational sheets stuck on all the walls, and very large windows, but sometimes English classrooms will have really small windows that hardly let in any light, and this is usually common in really small classrooms, and english classrooms tend to be much smaller than american, japanese, chinese and korean ones.
I will do the same for the Cafeteria, school gate, and playground.
