Totem

Character builders look easy right up until one arm floats three pixels off a new body, two gradients share an ID, and the exported SVG forgets every color it had in the browser. The usual fix is a growing pile of per-part exceptions. That pile eventually becomes the product.

Totem takes the opposite bet: artwork should enter through a strict contract, then compose predictably at runtime. The goal was a genuinely useful creative tool—parts, palettes, stats, local saves, durable links, and clean exports—without a server quietly doing the difficult bits offstage.

The canvas owns most of the screen, because the character is the point. Editing lives in one compact rail, while undo, randomize, share, save, and export stay in reach above the work instead of hiding behind a kebab menu wearing a tiny fake moustache.

Parts, rules, and color all use ordinary tabs, radios, and text inputs. The interface remains fast to scan and fully keyboard-operable, while the decorative grid, glow, and orbit marks give the builder enough occult machinery to feel like a toy rather than an asset-management form.

The strongest decision was making the part contract a product feature rather than a build chore. Once the assets agree on anchors, paint, IDs, and stable indices, the canvas, sharing, and export paths become pleasantly dull—and pleasantly dull systems are the ones that survive more inventory.

A next pass would add a visual-regression matrix over representative part combinations and turn the tiny part library into a documented contributor workflow. I would also add an export preview for people who want reassurance before downloading four sizes of the same tiny forest bureaucrat.