My own (humble) opinion below. (just keep working on one thing at a time, for the technique simply seems to work.)
1. The new worker would get you free of hwoarangmy bragging about it.
And it should look cool, indeed.
2. The next gen-forge is the #1 room that should get into OD 0.6.0, so focusing on finishing its models should be high in priority, still IMHO.
3. As next core gameplay elements, doors and bridges are missing. We can't really code them atm without the right models, even if we can use the wooden one for a start when on 0.6.0.
4. The tileset. This has to be done once and for all, IMHO. We have everything needed codewise, it is configurable with all the needed parameters. And it should be rather easy to test for you, even gradually as we now support different tilesets.
5. We should focus on gameplay missing creatures: The crypt creature, the keeper range-based creature and adding normals to those missing it. I don't care about adding others than those atm, IMHO.
Improving new portals, temples, ... is nice and can get along within all that, I'd say, when you need a refresher.
Btw, Spells belong more to the particle effects side of things and IMHO, once 0.5.0 is released, it will officially time to open a thread about how to add particle effects in game without killing someone's sanity.
Also, it's nice to see art is lagging behind for once.
But don't get too much pressure Danimal, we have plenty of things to polish on our side anyway in the meanwhile.
Later tasks we'll have to keep in mind IMHO (but later, no rush):
- Adding a (configurable) skybox.
- Adding ambient fog.
- Adding weak/subtle light sources on room centers.
- Adding a new tile type: grass (=Dirt). Yes, so we can have inside/outside transitions and make heroes enter a grotto when willing to fight Keepers, for instance.
- Adding (destructible) props: Railway, barrels, trees, ...
Best regards,