Focus, or lackthereof.

I think I might need some help, guys.

I'm getting to the point again where I have so many creaturely ideas that I'm in danger of getting overwhelmed and burned out and vanishing for months like I have so many times in the past. I really don't want that to happen, especially since (it seems like, anyway, maybe I'm just conceited) I'm getting a lot more community support for my projects this time around, and I really don't want to let you guys down.

At the same time though, I need to stick to working on things that I'm interested in-- I find that forcing myself into working on projects that bore or frustrate me, even if they're my most popular ideas, tends to make me burn out very quickly as well.

So I'm going to try to make a list here of all projects currently on my plate, and I would really appreciate it if you guys would comment and let me know both what sorts of things here interest you the most, as well as what interests you the least. Don't be shy-- I really would like to know before I waste a lot of time if no one is interested in something! So without further ado:

Revamping this blog -- It's something I've been wanting to do for ages-- mostly in terms of layout; I'd like refresh the look as well as add links to other pages, a way to easily subscribe to feeds, and so on. It's not something that would take more than a day's work or two, but I keep putting it off because it's just not the highest priority I guess.

Writing more CAOS tutorials -- My tutorials are of a different sort than most; while general tutorials show you how to make basic objects, I like to write about individual commands and how they work, or how to make certain scripts function. Most of these are more or less notes of things as I'm discovering them myself and cater to people that already have a decent grasp of CAOS, but I do enjoy writing them and wouldn't mind doing more articles on how more basic commands work too. Of course, the tutorials would only be as useful as readers made them, so I really want to be sure there's demand for that sort of thing before sinking time into it.

Documenting nurturing worlds --  I've been having a lot of fun with Mixed Berries and I will probably continue playing with it, but documenting it, screenshots and all, takes quite a bit of time. I certainly enjoy doing it, but I'm not sure how many people actually enjoy reading that stuff.

Work on Live Nornish Action stuff -- LNA is a bit of a favorite project of mine, but one that relies heavily on viewer interest, which there honestly doesn't seem to be a whole lot of. So one side of developing this is that further improvements could spark more interest; the other side is that I could put many days and nights of work into something that two or three people in the world really enjoy watching/participating in. There's also the risk of the warp server going down indefinitely, which makes the stream mostly pointless and the hours wasted. There are several things I can work on here:

• Redoing the status window so it actually wraps properly and is a little more flexible, as well as exploring the possibility of creating a larger font for it.
• Writing the client-server agents, which should allow people to interact with LNA remotely, with functions to retrieve your creatures or adopt native-born creatures from the world, drop food or toys in front of creatures, move creatures that are stuck or have wandered into unfortunate places, and so on.
• Planning and running some script-assisted competitions-- such as a fighting tournament with modified hit scripts so immortals don't have an unfair advantage, obstacle courses (sort of like an advanced IQ test) that rank creatures according to how fast they can get through them, or breeding competitions that keeps score of how many eggs a creature has laid, and so on.
• Another option is to use LNA for showing live development of other projects-- I'm not sure if that would interest or bore people, but it's open to opinions.

Finishing unfinished projects -- Most notably the Crossbreeding script and Critical Hit script falls under this catagory, as well as the Selective Muco, as much as I dread picking that back up again. But Project BattleStance is also very much on the table, which sort of has my interest now that I believe I actually have the skills to finish it if I wanted to. While not an agent, the Creatures Fanfiction Podcast is still a possibility too. And would anyone actually be interested in the lift ring-things if I were to polish them up and turn them into an actual agent?

Polishing old agents -- I always wanted to give the Mind Arrows a bit of a makeover; get rid of the sezz lines, allow them to be turned on/off as needed or adjust the range, possibly even allow filtering according to age/genus. SERU, hands down my most successful agent, might also benefit from a few tweaks and additions, and though I'm willing to bet most people would rather me release a version that scrapped all the cute storyline stuff in favor of making more weird creatures as fast as possible, I could have a lot of fun developing the interactive stuff further too. Population Control Options is another agent that could use a revamp to include support and filtering for ettins and grendels, and a few more options as well.

Following new sparks -- There are too many of these to count...I'll write the ones at the top of my head right now:

• Project Underground is probably the most prominent of these, but I really can't help but feel that the time I put into this is just going to go to waste-- it's such a massive undertaking and I'm still not sure I can pull off everything I want to that I'm almost certain sooner or later I'll hit a wall or get bored, it'll never get finished, and all the work I put into it will become nothing, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but well... I really am. Still, I love the idea and I have a lot of fun working on it-- if nothing else I feel like working on a near-rewrite of the game will help me improve my skills and gain a better understanding of how the inner-workings of the game work. I wouldn't count on anything else coming from it.
• I've been making extensive use of speech-bubble activated scripts to test agents and personal scripts and things, and I've been thinking of putting together a core module that allows speech-bubble activation to function, while making it extremely easy for other developers to incorporate the feature into their own agents-- it would be as simple as including a variable containing the activation word/phrase and the script to run when the word is said, allowing the agent to respond to speech-bubble commands (as long as the core module was installed) without having to rewrite the speech-bubble-searching bit themselves.
• An in-game photo album/journal. Just a weird idea I had recently and after fiddling with a few scripts realized was actually possible. The agent would consist of a little camera agent you could use to take pictures in your world (like those that you take of your creature, but anywhere, and with more size options) and then add them to a sort of scrapbook where you could write a description of the photo or whatever happened that day and so on. Kind of a big project and a pain in the rear to code, but a cute enough idea that I'd be willing to try it if there was interest.

... As you can see, I have quite a pile of projects to work on and some days I am just so overwhelmed by them all that I would much rather go read a book or play another game than decide what to do, and consequently no progress is made. So, maybe you guys can help me prioritize a little? Any and all feedback is appreciated; let me know what projects you think the community would benefit most from, as well as the ones you think are better left on the back burner!