Coming from a number of Character builders (web and apps) I am very pleased. It is easy to use and graphically appealing. Demiplane has their own take and I can get behind that!
Now the constructive criticism and/or feedback (of which I am guessing you already know all this, but kinda putting it down for my own notes)
- Clicking Ancestry, it seems that because of differences in what a person may or may not own, it seems programming wise, that each ancestry is being verified “does this person own this” As I don’t currently own anything past the Core Rule Book. The Cat, Kobald, Orc, Ratfolk, and Tengu all load a lot slower after the Core Ancestries.
- On a positive note, Having that Unlock button is super convenient as it shows everything I want and need to know if I want to add that.
- Positive, picking Ancestry options immediately after picking the Ancestry. This makes more sense as other builders you pick all that at the end.
- Selecting Background, again, via the code in the back-end, there seems to be something slowing the stuff that I have not purchased. I can’t tell if it is looping though all Backgrounds and then each one is checking and verifying, do they own it? I’m not sure if it would be better programming wise to change that so you check once and show two lists “Ones you own” and “Ones you can Unlock!”
- Positive, selecting a Background and getting the selections of the Background chosen (again, others don’t do that until the end)
- Class, again what is owned and not owned seems to have some slowness check.
- When selecting a Class, it takes a bit to load all the Class Options. I suspect that this is because every class has some 60+ options so the programming loops that are having to loop through all that data, I get it, it takes a but. I don’t know if there could be some DB optimization or the conditional loops that could be run differently to speed up the data and display of the data
- Positive, love that Pick class pick option, others don’t do this until the end
- Note, some missing information, but I figure you already know that
- When clicking Boost or Train skill, there is some kind of delay. Is this a long JS call that is causing this slowdown or is it clicked button, send to server, wait for server response, set data, reload display. Maybe change it up, that it changes on the user’s browser instantaneous while it is doing all the back end processing. (I can see the pros/cons doing it both ways)
- After Class, it would be nice to take the next steps for choosing equipment, spells, and what ever else needs to come next. I expect that is what will happen, but the Ancestry, Background, and Class feel like a nearly finished product, and clicking Save Changes and then To Character Sheet seems disjointed.
- Loading the character sheet take a long time 20-40 seconds
- Viewing the character sheet, the scrolls within scrolls within scrolls are not a good user experience.
- Which leads me to getting a lot of errors with talk.js
The connection to wss://app.talkjs.com/api/v0/G86UpSIi/socket/websocket?appId=… was interrupted while the page was loading. (trimmed down the line of code)
I am also getting a number of “script did not load. Check that you have a valid network connection.” And “Loading failed for the ” - Equipment adding/buying and gold. This looks to not be fully fleshed out, but I like where it is headed.
- There is no obvious display of the character’s gold/money
- Adding an item doesn’t ask to remove the cost form the character’s gold/money
- Searching/filtering the available equipment, it would be good to filter that list by the available level (maybe a simple check box "hide higher level gear/items)
- The filter doesn’t filter as expected. adding “bow” (without quotes) to the filter searches by that specific word/phrase so the only thing that gets returned is the Grievous, Bow. I was expecting the search/filter to be more of “bow” is contained in the searchable fields. Filtering by bow I would have expected the various shortbows, longbows, bows, and even bowl to be in the list
Overall I am happy and pleased with the direction the Character Builder is headed. I look forward to further iterations.
Note/Question, will the character be able to be imported into Foundry VTT?