I just tried out the Demiplane character creator alpha for the first time. This won’t be too in-depth, and I’m a very new PF2 player so I don’t have intimate knowledge of the system yet. Here are my initial thoughts:
The Good:
- I like the overall layout and look, even for an alpha.
- On the character sheet, I love having a list of actions, especially being able to expand a skill and see all of the various actions you can take with that skill. That’s a great shortcut for newer players like myself.
- Big fan of the “add your own notes” option under some things, like if you click on a stat such as Strength. Consider adding this in more places. It’s a great feature to help me remember my own mental notes about rules.
The Not So Good:
- Performance (at least in Firefox). There were lots of hangs when clicking certain buttons, and it took forever to load some things like the character sheet, but this is completely expected from an alpha test.
- There were some frame issues in places, like on the character sheet, where there are multiple layers of scroll bars. I’m certain this is also because it’s in alpha so not a big deal.
- Ran into at least one bug where it seemed to allow me to pick the same skill twice at level 1, for instance, I could pick Athletics from both my Fighter initial proficiency and my standard skill choices. I could be wrong but I don’t think this is supposed to be possible. It should probably warn you if you double-dip on something like that.
The Neutral:
- I would love a light mode. If there was a way to switch to it, I didn’t see it. I’m in the rare minority that doesn’t like dark modes.
- When selecting some things (such as the list of backgrounds), infinite scroll would be nice as an alternative to manual pagination.
- Consider adding an auto-save feature instead of a manual save button.
- Consider making the “To Character Sheet” button more prominent. It’s right above “Save Changes” but I didn’t notice it right away because it doesn’t have the same design language so I didn’t realize it was a button.
Overall Thoughts:
Definitely going in the right direction. I’m very much looking forward to using further iterations of this software.
