Wow its hard to say how much we appreciate this comment, thanks for playing it all the way and for the fantastic review! The whole team spent basically every hour outside work just in discord developing so it was just a ton of hard work and the talent of all my teammates that really made it possible to get it this far. And yes, Gabe, our musician, did a really great job with the sound track and that breakcore beat so I'm glad you liked it.
But for the background, it took me a while to get the right workflow, but I ended up grabbing images from wikimedia commons scaling them down to like 400x220 ish then running a custom quantize filter then palettes swapped them to the game's palette so everything looked consistent. I originally wanted to do them by hand, but there was just so much art in this project, with all the hand animations, lore, boards, pieces, tables, etc. that I didn't have the time. Though I felt that the hands being realistic actual did a really good job at tying the aesthetic together between background and foreground art, and I was really happy how it ended up.
Also I'm glad the Australia stage is aussie approved! That's probably my favorite too, I still laugh when I load it up.