>>534412224
to add the this, the whole idea of blue archive being an academy city school setting wasn't even finalized even after a year into the project.
things only started changing when they brought Hwangsang onto the team and he took over as art director. He designed arona, yuuka, shiroko, hifumi, and a few other characters and basically used those girls as a blueprint for how the rest of the game should look like, and the rest basically followed from there.
That man did a LOT for BA if you go back and read the dev interviews, it's genuinely crazy how much he was doing in the background and especially at the very beginning.