Kit Designer Guide
Here is a guide for Match Kit Designer, a supporter's feature that allows users to design match kits for their teams.
| Hello, dear Hattrick enthusiast! vivastpauli is currently speaking to you. :) If you're interested in the workings of the kit designer (which was created by the great Oxidus) you're exactly at the right place.
If you're reading this it also means you want learn how to make awesome kits, or -if you're already acquainted with it- increase your skills a little more. You might think "but dude, I have no talent for this stuff at all. Where do I even begin?" Easy. At the beginning! The magic ingredient is not talent, but patience. Yes, to make a masterpiece you might need talent... but! with patience you'll manage to make at least a decent one. This is our goal: a decent kit. If it turns out that you have the gift to produce even greater results, good for you! |
1. Basic Overview
Let's start with a quick look at what you'll be working with. I knoooow, "what's with all the yadayada? I wanna get started!", is probably what you think. But many newcomers might get confused with all the buttons and options you have at your disposal, trust me. If you think you can handle it anyway, just skip this section. But remember: Exactly knowing where your tools are and what they do is going to improve your input/output ratio significantly. The interface is basically divided into 3 areas: Left side: Control Area, Center Area: Kit Display, Right Side: Layer Area.
1.1. Control Area
This is where most of the magic happens! Here you select the shapes -including position, colour and opacity- you want to display on the kit. What the palette is to a canvas, this area full of buttons is to your kit. Additionally this is also where you can save, load and share your works. Let's go over the functions of said buttons quickly:
(A) Shapes: Here you can select all the shapes available to you, organized in categories. You select between basic geometric shapes, striped/checkered shapes, badges, numbers, swirl/star shapes, background pattern shapes, miscellaneous shapes, curved shapes and finally the font tool with which you can write.
(B) Fonts: The aformentioned writing tool can be accessed through the second button directly. Here you can also pick the font and the size of it. Please keep in mind that there is no bold or italic function, but there is a way make it look like that (I'll explain this later).
(C) Editing: The selected shape will be edited in this section. Length, width, rotation, colour, gradients, opacity and borders can be applied. You can also invert positions of shapes vertically/horizontally which makes it much easier/faster to apply symmetric shapes to both sides of the kit.
(D) Kit Gallery: This is where you can load previously made kits from your own collection or import so called kd3-files, which can be imported from your hard-drive.
(E) Showroom: If you want to take a look at how your new creation looks on the player avatars you can watch a selection of randomly generated faces in rotation. It's also the save area. You can choose between home and away kit for the current slots, upload it for others to rate and/or download into their own collection, and save it as a seperate kd3-file on your hard-drive.
(F) Copy/Paste: You will use this tool a lot. If you want to duplicate a shape, just click on the arrow button to copy a shape and click the other arrow button to paste it again. This comes in handy when you want to display a lot of similar shapes but don't want to edit every single one from the ground up. An example may be when you want to copy the shades on the shorts from front to back. Just copy/paste the whole set, invert them vertically and BAM, you got shades on the back without much effort. You can copy up to 8 shapes at once in this temporary space.
1.2. Kit Display
This is, like I said before, basically your canvas. Everything you change in the other two areas will be visible here. You'll have the option to select seperate (G) background colours for the three sections: shirt, shorts and socks. The (H) shirt buttons gives you the opportunity to switch between back and front of the kit. The (I) Reset Design button is for when you've come to the conclusion: "This doesn't work at all, let's try again!" Something like a magic eraser. Don't be scared, if you hit it accidentally there'll be a confirmation question.
1.3. Layer Area
How the pieces (shapes) fall together is important for the final look of your kit. It's where you can organize your countless (max. 99 per side) shapes into order. More importantly though is the order in which a certain shape is displayed atop the other, so-called (J) layers. By using the technique of layers you can form and combine simple shapes into awesome constructs like bagdes and logos of sponsors/equipment suppliers!
Now we know where everything is, so let's get stared!
