Introducing: Custom Character Profiles!

Also added character profile navigation and a few style tweaks

Published in

wriget

6 min readJul 19, 2019

Characters tend to come with a lot of information. Age, appearance, personality, hopes, fears, goals, motivation, and so on. But up until now, Wriget has only let you add general description (and other defaults, like relationships) to your characters’ profiles.

But now, you get to decide what else you want to keep track of with: Custom Character Profile Templates! Here’s how they work.

Tl;dr

How to use the Character Profile Template:

Go to Project > Profile Template (under “Characters”)
Click “Create”
Add items to the draft
Click “Apply”
Go to Characters > [character of your choice]
Your template shows under the “About” Section.

Other Changes:

Added profile navigation to character pages
“Delete Character” button moved from top-right menu to bottom of page
Mobile bug fix: Profile item labels appear above input field

How to make Character Profile Template

Step 1: Create the template

Go to the “Profile Template” item in the project navigation. If you have not created a profile template for your project, you will be met with the following view.

Click on “Create.” The page will refresh, and you will then see a page titled “Character Profile Template (Draft).”

Step 2: Creating the Draft

Click on the “Add” Button. A new card will appear where you can enter a label and an entry type.

At the time of this article, there are currently two types:

Text — For one line.
Paragraph — For multiple lines. This will auto-resize the more you input and the “Enter” key will work if you want multiple paragraphs.

More types are in our backlog, including numbers, drop down selects, calendar dates, bullet lists, subsections headers, etc. However, these will be paid features (Hobby+ subscription) since they are more convenience and not necessity. Keep an eye out!

Select what type you want. A preview of the result will appear below the form input and wala! Your character’s profile template now has a new field. Add as many as you like.

But it won’t show quite yet…. We’ll get to that in the next step.

As for other things you might want to do:

Edit? Click on the item. It will turn into a “card,” and the form to edit the item will appear.
Unfocus? Click outside the card.
Add at specific location? Click the item you want the new card to be added under. The Add button will appear under it.
Reorder? Just click on the card you want to move, drag, and drop.
Delete? Drag and drop what item you don’t want in the trash. Trash will be emptied when you click the “Apply” button.
Note: It will ONLY be emptied (and items deleted) when you click the “Apply” button. Instead of making and deleting 100 items, it’s recommended you relabel/re-purpose old ones instead.

Step 3: Apply the template draft

Template is how you like it? Great! Hit that “Apply” button. The page will do the loading thing, and you’ll be switched over to the “Applied” tab where you can see the end result.

Now it’s time to see the true power of this feature.

At any given time, you can return to this tab to see what you’re currently using. Super handy if you’re updating your draft and need a reference, want to share with a friend, and so on. ;D

Why a two-step process like this? Why not make everything automatic?
This can gets into some heavy technical jargon, but the simplest answer is: What if you want to delete something, change your mind, then re-add it? Automatic means you’d lose data. Two-step gives you time to think.
We don’t keep track of the fields by their label— otherwise, a simple label change (eg. “gender” > “sex”) could break your profile and you’d lose data. It’s possible to do this without losing data, yes. But you can also build a house out of sand. Maintenance isn’t fun. Too many “what ifs?” We’d all prefer to not live with the bugs. And things get really, really messy.
Thus, we keep track of fields by id. That is safest. It gives you flexibility when changing labels. It minimizes risk of weird stuff happening. But we don’t expect you to keep track of these ids (they’re gibberish) or expect you to care. Keep your brain power on being creative.
However, when you delete something, that id is gone forever. That means we have no way of finding where your data is in our database anymore.* :c Adding a new item with the same label as what you had before will not bring it back.
The draft gives you a place to play around with minimal risk of losing data. You can change your mind. For anything you put in the trash, you must confirm you are okay with deleting your data before you actually do so.
* Furthermore, we don’t want orphaned data taking up space, we delete all data associated with that id anyway. A future plan is to introduce version control for subscribers. This let’s you get back data you’ve “dumped.” But for now, hosting is expensive. We don’t have subscribers yet. We can’t afford it. (;A;)

Step 4: Start filling out your Character’s new profile!

Return to “Characters” and select what character you want to edit.

You will see a new section in the profile navigation menu called “About.” Your template will be added under this section. Click on this to jump to the section, or scroll down yourself.

Now you can edit it, just like any other profile item.

Have fun!

Other Changes

Added profile navigation to character pages

Already mentioned, but in case you missed it. We added a navigation section left of the character’s profile. As we add more features, more sections may be appended to the character’s page. This makes jumping to sections easier.

Note: “About” will only appear if you have an applied profile template.

Character’s “Delete” button moved to bottom of page

This change is meant for:

Style consistency (refer to dashboard >> project settings page, for an example)
To avoiding lumping “Delete” with future menu items.

Aka, delete is special. It needs to be hard to do, but very, very obvious you are doing it.

Yes, clicking “Delete” will give you a popup to confirm, but other things in the (future) menu may have popups too — and you’re probably trying to cram in some creative work well past your bedtime or some other condition you should not be driving in— or you may accidentally click the wrong menu item and have another popup you didn’t ask for in your life. Separate is best.