Great work so far, I expect the character creation process to be even more straightforward once the performance issues are ironed out! In the meantime, I’ll be commenting this post with some feedback on style and features (rather than bugs). Obviously everything in this post is just my opinion, so for the sake of brevity I will omit the corresponding figures of speech.
Note: I will begin by duplicating some of my feedback from Discord for (my own) ease of tracking.
Compactness
Suggestion: The character sheet can probably be made more compact.
Issue: Taking the skill list as an example, the very large font as well as the second line dedicated to the ability the skill is based on make the whole list much longer than it needs to be. Overall the large margins and fonts create quite a bit of bloat (I had the same feeling switching from Android 11 to 12, if you know what I’m talking about).
The page is quite narrow: the character sheet takes only 40% of the screen by width (by comparison, the D&D Beyond character sheet takes almost 45%).
At the same time, while displaying roughly the same amount of information (fewer actions, but that requires scrolling anyway), the Beyond character sheet only takes 65% of the screen vertically, whereas the Demiplane one takes nearly 150%. The resulting double scrolling (in and out of each box) is not super convenient.
Light Theme
Suggestion: The grayscale color scheme should be optional as a dark theme rather than the default.
Issue: Dark themes are often less informative because there are only so many shades of grey that are discernable. This is most obvious in the character creator:
- In the ancestry menu grey boxes indicate available options, while black boxes indicate unavailable options (this was a bit off-putting at first by the way, because the grey ones look, well, greyed out)
- Once you’ve selected an ancestry though, it becomes black, like the unavailable ones
- In other menus completed sections are blacked out (still a bit confusing), but selecting an option only greys out the button while the option itself remains grey…
In short, the menus are screaming for more color options between default, selected, completed and unavailable, and that’s just unfeasible with a grayscale theme. In fact, it might be best to have just one (light) theme for the character builder, with more options for the sheet.
[End of Discord duplication]
Removing feats chosen at other levels is unnecessary
Suggestion: The “Already chosen” button shouldn’t be a button.
Current behavior: For example, if one picks a class feat at level 1, the feat menu at level 2 will have the feat labeled as “Already chosen”, and clicking that button removes the feat. However, one still has to go back to the level 1 menu to add a different feat instead.
Issue: A plausible use for “Already chosen” as a button is if one wants to take the feat at level 2 instead of level 1. However, this is likely to only be useful when adding multiple levels at once (e.g., creating a build), which is quite uncommon in game. Moreover, the user would have to go back to level 1 to select another feat anyway.
What is much more likely is accidentally clicking this button and then having to go back to level 1 to fix the mistake. More generally, the ability to change at one level options selected at a different level feels primarily like a source of errors and confusion rather than a feature.