New content - ice magic, respawn points

Hooray, hazzah and woot..  I've made some actual visual progress at last. A couple of weeks of restructuring and engine fixes are finally over and I've started working on miscellaneous new features.  This week, I've done a few additions and modifications.

Firstly, the death and respawning is in now. Respawn spoints will be spread throughout the maps and are activated by running over them. Only 1 respawn point can be active at once, so the player will respawn back at the most recently activated respawn point. This is meant as a strategic penalty to be managed by the player... Of course, pretty much anything that is a penalty to the player is open to revision since players don't usually appreciate being penalised for anything.  Whenever you die, you teleport back to the respawn point and are revived with minimal hitpoints and mana and with any spells/curses or ailments removed.

Secondly, there is now an Ice Bolt spell. This is like Fire Bolt except with a chance to freeze. All cold damage done also attaches a cold status modifier for a few turns which will reduce their movement and attack rate. Also, any frozen enemy has a slightly increased critical hit chance. I pinched that idea from WoW. I hope they forgive me.

Next, I've upgraded the inventory screen. You can now see exactly how much effect any enchantments have on each stat. This includes indirect effects such as Giant Strength increasing your damage since damage is affected by strength. The enchanted crystals graphics have had a rework and it also shows how effective each crystal is when slotted  (since slots are all affected by misc. elements like light/day/war/peace).

I've added 2 new enemies. Trolls and Ogres. Both of these turn to stone during daylight so there is an element of strategy here, especially if you get quests that involve killing these beasts, or running through an area inhabited by high level ogres or trolls. While they are stone they are completely immune to damage, so no sniping them. You'll need to camp and wait till sundown if you want to battle them.

Finally, I've done some more work adding hi-res versions of more textures and tilemap graphics. Looking forward to getting an iPhone4 to see how they look on the "retina" display.

I think I'll probably work on getting a shop working, and getting some puzzle elements in place yet, but I should dump some more ideas on paper and prioritize them. Looks like a few weeks still till I'm really ready to start laying out real content.

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