TL;DR
A user emailed me about a bug and dropped two genuinely good feature ideas. I built both this week: mutual (two-way) relationship arrows and a manual color picker for each relationship, plus a little guide that finally explains how the auto-coloring works. Also squashed a bug and an annoying animation glitch. Go try it.
If you’ve ever emailed a solo dev and heard nothing back — that’s not the deal here. You email, I build. Sometimes within the week.
How this started
Someone — let’s call them a worldbuilder, because that’s exactly what they are — emailed support saying they couldn’t find where to create groups or add tags. They wondered if it was a Pro thing, or if I’d quietly removed it.
It wasn’t either. It was a bug. A dumb one.
The editor was hiding the “Manage Groups / Manage Tags” button until you already had a group. Which is a beautiful little chicken-and-egg trap: you can’t make your first group because the button to make groups only shows up after you’ve made a group. Cool. Great. Shipped that, apparently.
Fixed. There’s now a ”+ Add a group” chip the moment you have a character on the canvas.
But then the same email kept going, and that’s where it got good.
Idea 1: Mutual relationships
Their point, paraphrased: some relationships go both ways, some don’t.
Two rivals who both know they’re rivals? That’s mutual. One character who’s secretly obsessed with another who doesn’t even know they exist? That’s one-directional. The tool was forcing you to draw two identical arrows for the mutual case, which is silly and clutters the graph.
So now there’s a “Mutual” toggle when you add or edit a relationship. Flip it on, and you get a single line with an arrowhead on both ends. One relationship, drawn once, pointing both ways. Leave it off and you keep the directional single arrow for the “A knows B, B has no clue” cases.
Honestly this is one of those features that’s obvious in hindsight. It took a user actually drawing their characters to point it out.
Idea 2: Colors that make sense
Here’s a thing I never explained well: relationship lines get colored automatically, by keyword. Type “rival” and the line goes amber. Type “father” and it goes green. Romance is pink, hostility is red, and so on.
The problem? That matching was completely invisible. So when this user labeled a relationship “mistress” and another “right hand man,” both came out grey, and there was no way to know why. The tool was basically playing a guessing game and not telling anyone the rules.
Two fixes:
- A color guide. There’s now a little ”?” next to the Relationships legend. Click it and you see every category, its color, and example words that trigger it. No more guessing.
- A manual color picker. Don’t want to rename your labels just to get the right color? Fair. Now every relationship has a color picker — keep your own wording, set the color yourself. It even shows you which colors are already in use and on what, so your palette stays consistent.
The boring-but-important stuff
While I was in there:
- Fixed an animation glitch where nodes would scale up when highlighted and then immediately snap back, like they changed their mind. Turned out to be an over-aggressive easing curve overshooting and recoiling. Calmed it down.
- Rebuilt the “Edit Relationship” panel so the controls actually match the rest of the app — the Mutual toggle is now a proper switch instead of a tiny checkbox, and the color picker tucks away until you need it.
What I’m taking from this
| Lesson | The short version |
|---|---|
| Real users find real bugs | I never hit the group chicken-and-egg trap because I always had groups already. They didn’t. |
| The best roadmap is an inbox | Two of this week’s features were just… someone telling me what they needed. |
| Invisible behavior is a bug | The auto-coloring “worked” — but if users can’t see the rules, it might as well be broken. |
Thank you
Genuinely — to the people emailing me bug reports, half-formed ideas, and “hey would it be possible to…” messages: this is the good stuff. A tool this small lives or dies on whether the handful of people actually using it feel heard. You do. Keep them coming.
If you’re building a story, a comic, a campaign, or a whole world and you want your character web to make sense — go make a chart. And if something’s missing or broken, you know where to find me.
More soon. I keep changing things.
See the running dev log for everything else, or read about the tech behind this thing.