One piece of feedback came up again and again during our playtest: players wanted the ability to create their own football team!
When we started working on Kitman, we had a nice little narrative in mind where you play as the Kitman for a fictional club called Northshore Athletic. We designed a custom Northshore club crest, settled on a satisfying blue, white and orange colour palette, and put together a distinctive squad uniform that made good use of those colours.
We thought we had done a pretty good job. But players kept asking if they could create their own teams, and perhaps we needn't be quite so precious about Northshore Athletic.
So, for the upcoming demo, we have added a whole range of team customization options! Northshore Athletic will still be the default, but if that doesn’t work for you, you can make the team your own!
First up is team name customization. Players can now choose their own team name and acronym, which will appear in league tables, on the club crest and even in post-match pundit commentary. You can call your team whatever you like, although we will have to trust everyone to keep the rude names to a minimum.
You can also choose your team's colour palette. These colours are applied throughout the game, including your team's kit and various parts of the environment. Finding a set of palettes that looked good together and provided enough variety took a bit of work, but we were able to take plenty of inspiration from real-world football teams. We have not directly copied any of them, but look closely and you may spot a few familiar influences.
Kit customization works in a similar way. Players can choose from a selection of different jersey patterns, each designed to work with the available colour palettes. Again, these take inspiration from real-world football, hopefully giving players something recognizable while remaining distinctly our own.
Finally, we have added club crest customization. We designed more than 20 fictional crests, with the aim of giving players plenty of choice while making sure every option looks good in-game.
Taken together, these changes have made a surprisingly big visual difference. We had become so accustomed to seeing Kitman filled with Northshore Athletic's blue, white and orange that seeing the same environment with a red team running around in it was a bit of a shock to the system!
One thing we are still discussing is whether to give teams separate home and away kits. On the surface, this seems like a bit of a no-brainer. However, because footballer's stats are tied to their gear, switching kits could mean having to reassign an entirely new set of kit. That could quickly turn something that should be fun into a rather annoying bit of admin, and while we love realism, we don’t want to sacrifice fun to get there. We're open to suggestions so drop us a note on Discord (linked below) if you have any ideas!
We hope you enjoy having the freedom to make Kitman feel a little more like your own game. As always, we are keen to hear what you think, and we would love to hear what other customization options you would like to see in the future.
Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to the launch of the public demo. To stay in touch with the latest developments and chat to us about features you’d like to see added to the game next, pop on over to the Outlier Discord.
Love,
Bernard & the Outlier team