Haha, as someone who was once a high school girl, I can say we would have probably approved of LBD uniforms. That's her casual outfit though, since she doesn't go to their school. I have the girl uniform around somewhere... Oh yeah, here it is:
I'm starting to work on backgrounds again, and the process has been significantly speed up because Samu-kun has allowed me to use some of the photos that he took in Japan.
Something else I should mention is that we have decided to do individual sprite tinting. What we have been doing previously is place a tinted layer over a whole scene, so all the sprites had an orange tint in sunset scenes for instance. This is a generally easy way, but restricted in what I could do since I could only use opacity vs the layer modes in photoshop. So now I'm going to be giving each sprite a tinted layer that is specifically suited to a scene. Which means each sprite will be getting adjustment layers for each background for each light variation. Yep. It will be a little fiddlely and I won't be able to do them until a) I have all the backgrounds and sprites finished and b) Camille tells me specifically who is going to be where when (or in the case of main characters, may not be somewhere). It's extra work, but it should look really, really nice. Also figured out that we will probably have to have a set of close-up sprites for when the characters are, ah, closer to the camera? The example below is a very quick and dirty example, but it get the idea across.
