Do you create content for Creatures? If so, what sorts? What do you use to make things, and what would you like to make in the future? If not, what would you like to make if you could?
Why yes, yes I do.
My tools of choice are the CAOS Tool and Jagent, along with helpers like the CAOS debugger. I've also found Windows Grep to be invaluable when trying to remember the best context in which to use a CAOS command.
There are so many things I'd like to make in the future; it's just a matter of finding time and energy and prioritizing reasonable projects over crazy audacious ones. I'd love to rewrite the Garden Box from scratch but that probably isn't the best use of my time. I'm currently messing with some scripts to log every creature action to a file that can be parsed to gather all sorts of fun data for analysis purposes. I've also got at least a dozen scenario scripts in concept that I'd like to implement but then I wonder if I should just write a central scenario core agent with a ton of parameters you can set by hand to make your own scenarios, with the ability to write, export, and import others' parameters (similar to C3 blueprints). But that's such a huge project that if I started it you'd probably hear an update a decade later, so maybe I should just stick with the small standalone scripts. I'm also still really in love with a lot of the concepts in Project Underground and even wrote a ton of lore for it a few years back, but that's probably a life's worth of work. I guess I'm just at a rather frustrating point where the only projects I want to work on are too large for me to reasonably complete, so I tend to spend more time just enjoying playing the games and hoping I'll get inspired enough to tweak a few things along the way without feeling compelled to rewrite the entire game. I guess I'll see where that takes me.
Garden Box is definitely good enough as it is. If you're gonna do something, do something new! Many of your creations are already great help enough as they are, from Elevines through the Magic Words to the Garden Box in particular! So rather than fixing what already works, you could fix something that doesn't neccessarily work, or try to do something different ^.^
ReplyDelete... Says the guy who made a breed for the least popular Creatures game with Akamai Cannies already present for years, I know.
Heh, I think it's most important in development to work on stuff that's important/interesting to you personally, regardless of how popular it might be!
DeleteBut then, the fact that the stuff that interests me most (which is often new and interesting ways to organize/structure chunks of CAOS itself) is often the least interesting to the average user can be demotivating, especially when I depend a lot on user interest to generate the sparks that keep me going. I guess it's a matter of balance, really.