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Playing around with the web demo I've found three issues.

  1. Clicking on an already focused input field unfocuses it. Since focused&unfocused are both red, and focused:hover&unfocused:hover are both orange, there is no visual indication of this. Typing at this point is likely to trigger a hotkey, causing unexpected behavior. (h is particularly distressing, as it shows a black screen.)
  2. When choosing "One pronoun set with custom pronouns and terms" I receive the prompt for entering custom pronouns, but terms are limited to a choice of three sets. I would expect this option to allow custom inputs for terms as well.
  3. Inputs need better sanitization. I found three reliable ways to crash the demo with my (admittedly weird) gender terms. For context, I am a man and a [girl]. The square brackets are important enough to me that I wanted to try them out, but uhhh. Yeah, that caused issues.
    1. In Advanced term selection: just typing the first [ will cause a crash, even if preceded by a \.
    2. In Custom pronouns: after inputting [she]/[her] pronouns, it crashed after hitting confirm. Again, even if preceded by a \.
    3. In Update custom pronouns: Again, just typing [ will crash it.

I think to start I should clear up the intention of the web build - it's there just to demonstrate the things that the pronouns system can do. Given the different styling needs of projects, I don't expect someone to drop the screens into their project without modifying them to suit the theme of their own UI, or updating them so the input length & allowed characters suits their font. It's also designed to have as few assets as possible (mostly using coloured rectangles) so it loads quickly and there are few assets for the browser to cache.

With that in mind, 1) is intentional. You should be able to click on the input again to disable it, since particularly for mobile users this will dismiss the keyboard so they can see the rest of the screen again. I do appreciate your suggestion to make it clearer which of the input boxes is currently accepting input, however, so I'll include styling for that in a future update.

2) This is intentional. For people who aren't familiar with screen language, or don't need the fine-tuned flexibility of the terms system, I wanted to demonstrate an option that gives the player some additional control over their terms and pronouns, but doesn't require a complex screen setup beyond the pronoun input. If you have a suggestion for how to make the wording of that choice clearer, I can update it. The choices are there mostly to demonstrate increasingly complex setups you can achieve with the system, rather than expecting a user to present this exact choice menu to the player.

3) This wasn't a priority for me as I operated under the assumption that a user will need to apply their own restrictions onto the input anyways - not every font supports the same characters, they might want different length or pixel width restrictions, etc. Thus, I've only applied the bare minimum of a length restriction on the input. But in the interest of a more stable web build, this is something I can update as well.

Thanks for your suggestions! I hope the system proves useful to you.

That's what I thought, but when I encountered a crash I figured it couldn't hurt to take half an hour to comb through for anything else that was a little hinky.

  1. I hadn't considered the mobile end of things, but that makes sense. Glad to hear the second part.
  2. "One pronoun set with custom pronouns and a choice of terms" might work? Although that's making an already long option even longer. Alternatively, in the terms menu you could have four buttons: Neutral, Feminine, Masculine, and Custom, where the Custom button brings up the custom terms screen. This branch already makes use of a screen, so I don't really see the point in avoiding it in the back half.
  3. That also makes sense, and I'm also glad to hear that second part too.

I'm sure it will! I cobbled together my own solution for a (probably scrapped) WIP some time ago, but it was really clunky. This ties up everything I was trying to do in a nice, neat, cohesive package. Thank you for making it available!