On a sad note, Trent (Mittens) had his last day today.
I was going to ask him when his last day was. Boo. But hopefully he has fun at his new position also!
The screen you see here will likely be significantly altered between now and release. But this gives you an idea of how iterative the process is. I’ll probably eliminate the appearance area and put that into the custom race area. Right now, “design your race” is the only option. There isn’t a formal “choose your faction” area. Elemental comes with 2 built in races and 12 factions but we plan to let people create their own races and factions as well, but that should be a separate area that is a lot richer. If you try to mash too much stuff together, it’s confusing to new players but still too weak for experienced users.
On this note, you could always go with the age-old basic and advanced setups. You could create some basic profiles for various races (courageous warriors, peaceful magicians, evil tyrant, enterprising merchant, etc) that people will be able to pick from in addition to this more basic screen, if they just want to make something new but don't care to dig in all the various properties. These profiles would be linked to different settings in the "advanced" customization window, where you could go in and tweak everything that can be tweaked to your heart's content.
That way experienced users get as much customization as possible, but at the same time the new users don't get overburneded with it.
Neverwinter Nights games do a decent job of this. When you select your class you can pick between different templates that come with preset skills, feats, and such. The same could work fairly well here, I think.
Edit: I agree with dropping good/evil for stock races. Some should be naturally good, others naturally evil. There may be room in their stories to wiggle alignment a little bit (depends on how you guys do the campaign, if anything is persistent), but this kind of toggle is best left to custom races.