Hi folks, I’m the artist working on Havencall! A lot has been going on here at Fancy Fish Games, and it has largely been focused around creating art and assets lately, so I’m here to tell you about our progress!
First, a little background on the visual design of Havencall: the game is meant to make you feel like you are walking through a painting. The art style is half-way between a simpler cartoony look and a detailed, realistic one. Luckily, our in-house animation tools make it easy to create many animations without having to draw things frame-by-frame, so we were able to go with this somewhat detailed style without the project taking a ridiculously long time.
For instance, here is a new animation of the main character, Aura, falling through the air and landing (please note this animation is “in place,” so it looks a little funny since she will actually be moving downwards rapidly during the first half of the animation):
Aura already has a running and idle animation (which you can check out in our prototype video), and next on the list for her will be a front-facing run and a back facing run, so she can move towards and away from the camera. Here she is in her in-game front and back standing positions, all ready to be animated:
A complete new area was finished recently, and I wrote a long walk-through about the process of making it, if you are interested in that sort of thing (link). I’ll give a short summary here: the scene is a desolate wasteland area, with rocky plateaus, a group of volcanoes, and a range of ice mountains in the distance. Here's a sketch of the landscape: 
And here is the completed scene. Note this is much, much smaller than the in-game version, since the image is so wide:
Here are a few closer clips of the scene:
At this point the scene will get some animations (cloths flapping, treetops blowing in the wind, tumbleweeds tumbling), a few NPCs for Aura to interact with, and a new sky (the sky in this scene needs to be dynamic for gameplay purposes). Then, the mountains in the distance of this scene will be used for another scene which takes place high in the sky above this town. The scene in the sky is the location of an epic boss "battle," so I am very excited to start working on that!
I’ve also been delving into some cut scene material recently, some of which I won’t reveal so as not to spoil it. But here is a short sequence with some close-up frames of our protagonist:
This is still just a draft - in the final version her expression will change slightly over the course of these frames, and her hair will be animated to blow in the wind. Here's a close-up from the second frame above:
There’s still a lot to do, but progress is definitely happening and we hope to have a lot more gameplay-oriented material in soon!
Let us know what you think of all this! Check out our brand spankin’ new forums Here, and leave us a comment there, or here on IndieDB!
Happy Holidays everyone!
