One of the very first things you do as you dive into Palia is get to create and customize your character!
Notice the purple void-looking background? That’s actually tied to the lore, and you’ll find out more as the main storyline unravels.
There’s a whole plethora of options ranging from face shapes, skin tones, voices, as well as hairstyles and clothing options for you to choose from. The initial set of outfits seen here are always available as default options that you can go back and swap to at your convenience. You can mix and match to your heart’s content!
We plan to add more customization options over time, including body types. Please stay tuned!
The final step in creating a character is deciding on a name. In Palia, there’s two: There’s your character’s Full Name, which can be seen as the display name that everyone else sees as you run around. But we also included a Nickname, which is what the villagers and dialogue will refer to you as. We included this for a bit of roleplaying and immersion, separate from what your Full Name ends up being.
In general, visible “gear” in our game is purely cosmetic. There may be gameplay items that are visible, but they are not intended to interfere with any “look” you are trying to achieve. This gives players more choices to express their identity, rather than picking gear for the best possible stats.
You can absolutely shift your outfit and our goal is to have a wide variety of options; fashion is a big part of our game’s culture! But at launch, realistically, these will be pretty limited compared to our ambitions. Our plan is to constantly up our fashion game and give you everything from runway looks to hobo chic. That being said, we do plan to allow you to change clothes from the available options fairly easily through any wardrobe furniture item, including allowing you to save outfit configurations for quick swaps.
When you create your character in the beginning, we’ll have a lot of hairstyles and colors you can choose from. We currently do not have a barber or stylist in the game, but as we flesh out our roster of Villagers we do want to include one for players to go to for hair customization, as we feel hairstyles are a key part of player identity and expression. We're also very open to hearing what hairstyles you want to wear, so please let us know in #suggestions-and-feedback!
Our current system has you choosing pre-existing color palettes—we call them variants—so for each outfit piece you’ll have a number of options to choose from right at the get-go. This will likely be the system we have in place for the game’s launch, though a lot of consideration is being done to make sure we’re catering to the kind of themes, colors and patterns our community wants to see.