Graphics Improvements, New Mobs news - Lost Gateways

Spell Casting:

I was able to do some rework of the casting, I plan on having the intensity of the particles be tied directly to the level of the spell being cast:

Also notice the casting animation now has glowing hands!

Terrain Graphical fixes, Animated Water, Fringe, Alpha bug fixed:

And woo the return of animated water (Finally!), I had a huge problem with FPS drops when using a large texture in background with transparency, (I would lose like 100 fps with the nicely animated water on), it’s something with SFML when I render a texture to the whole screen (1024×768) it just kills performance, but if I render the normal map tiles as an animated sequence it looks good!
- Fixed a bug with the alpha values blending on my shores.
- Increased ground clutter density and double ground clutter graphics
- Reworked some more of the beach tiles to include a better transition into the water, it looks much nicer IMO:

New Mobs and Items:

Sheep, Bats (WIP), Mushrooms, Wool

Thoughts:

- Fixed main menu screen to display all tiles properly (Fixed Alpha blending, added all tree types to world gen)
- Main menu will now properly seed the random terrain generator instead of using a static seed of 0

I spent an hour “playing” the game and I found that its actually quite difficult to keep your health up while exploring… Even with harvesting health potions etc.

I have to really resist the urge to start balancing because I want to have a fully functioning game before I start to balance weapons, armor, hunger, thirst, etc.
Right now the mob spawn is probably a little high, but on the other hand its pretty interesting I found myself killing a few slimes and being at half health, waiting on my mana to regen (As a cleric), and just randomly harvesting herbs to make more healing potions and BAM some ground shooters appears and I had to run off, as I was running I aggroed 3 slimes (which of course ended up combining) and I ended up running out of stamina as the slime caught up with me…
So as my last ditch effort I casted my last heal spell and we fought, I ended up with about 7 health (maybe 1 or 2 hits from this larger slime) when he was finally killed…

Exploration is dangerous! but the game is starting to get more interesting =)

A few more hostile world spawn mobs and a few more animals are needed for sure.

Here are some NPCS I would like to add:

- Sheep (Wool, Meat)
- Bats (Bat Wings, Meat) – They will fly and can ignore terrain
- Spider (Spider silk) – They will shoot webs that slow the player
- Skeleton (Bones, Gold, Misc Gear) – A strong mob that is slow.
- Ghost (Ectoplasm, Gold) – Mobs strong against physical attacks but weak against magic.

And I still have some major game features I need to add

- Archery
- NPC Vendors