New Clothes, Avatar Features and Fun with Glitch Mash

Over the last few months the avatar fashion department has been pushing the boundaries of costume design, and consequently, we’ve created some of our craziest outfits yet. (The good kind of crazy, of course.)

With nearly 800 clothing items to choose from, there are now many options to suit all tastes, whether you want your avatar to run around as a pink unicorn, sassy maid or a martial official. Here’s a little overview of some of the more interesting avatar customization options to date.

(Heads-up: (many of) the following links don’t work if you don’t have a Glitch account. Sorry!)

Fairy Tales to Feisty Felines

Our fashion-related forum threads have continued to grow with hundreds of original ideas for avatar outfits. Some requests have been very practical, leading to additions such as the safety helmet for mining, a lab coat for intermediate admixing, or chef’s attire for some EZ cooking. Other suggestions have been more imaginative, ranging from manatee costumes and teflon suits to crocodile skulls and baby bonnets.

With so many creative concepts emerging from our forums, we decided to first focus on the most recurring clothing themes. Not surprisingly, many players had expressed an interest in dressing up as a fairy tale character or a superhero. We already had a Space Crusader outfit, so we added Ladycat suits in black and red for the more feminine superheros and completed our Japanese-themed collection with sea dragon outfits in blue, purple, green and white.

Shortly thereafter, we added some dinosaur costumes and unicorn outfits. There were a lot of prehistoric creatures wandering around during the tests that followed, so we decided to continue the costume trend with gorilla outfits in white, orange, pink and traditional black. To top it off, we also created Girlla variations, complete with lipstick and a matching bow.

Getting Global: Dirndls, Sherwanis and Matador Garb

Glitch may still be in Beta, but news about the game have already traveled far and wide. During a recent test, we saw players logging in from 88 different countries, including places like Uruguay, Malta, Singapore, Israel and Kuwait.

Players have already started several country-specific groups to share their culture and language with their Glitch compatriots and friends. The world of Glitch itself is inspired by many different places and people: you might find streets named after Finnish rivers or walk through forests that remind you of your own back yard – although you’re more likely to stumble into something you’ve never seen before.

Back in the Wardrobe, you now have a couple more options for dressing up in traditional garb from different countries around the world. Players from Germany will recognize the new lederhosen and dirndls that match the new knee highs and Dutch clogs. We added some Spanish flare with a couple of torero outfits and took a detour to India with the new sherwanis and turbans. There are more internationally themed outfits in the works, so be sure to check the Wardrobe for new additions over the course of the next few weeks.

Vanity, Improved

Changing clothes in the Wardrobe is only part of the fun of creating a unique avatar – often it’s the little adjustments in the Vanity that make a big difference. We’ve added numerous facial features since we entered Beta and there are more customization options for subscribers as well as non-subscribers.

The new hair selections include greaser hair, the mohawk, a straight bob, the buzzcut, dreadlocks and a couple of styles with ponytails. As many of our players know, the eyes, noses and mouths on the avatars can be shifted, resized and combined to make some pretty bizarre faces, so our avatar models in the image above look relatively “normal” compared to some of the characters you might run into in the game.

Finally, the Vanity also has a new full-length mirror so it’s easier to see your avatar from head to toe and pick the facial features that match your entire outfit. Handy!

Glitch Mash

With so many clothes and facial features to choose from, it didn’t take long for people to start organizing their own fashion shows and “beauty contests” in-game and on the forums. Players have been coming up with new looks and comparing them on “hot-or-not” threads for quite some time. These threads got particularly busy when the game was offline and we all agreed that it would be cool to have an app that would make it easier to play the rating game. Our lead engineer Bees! aka Cal thought it would make for a fun side project, so he whipped up a site that allows viewers to rate the attractiveness of player-submitted avatars in the form of Glitch Mash.

It’s a good thing he did, because people absolutely love Glitch Mash – at this point in time, there have been 238,029 votes cast on 2,145 different outfits. That’s a lot of votes and a lot of really awesome entries for the 43 days the app has been around. Just check out some of the outfits in the top 30 at the time this post was written:

Glitch Mash is not an ‘officially’ supported feature, but it’s an excellent open source demo of what can be done with the Glitch API. Other developers have been coming up with equally awesome apps, but all of these projects deserve a more techy post of their own. Until then, Glitch Mash away!

Other recent blog posts

• Glitch HQ — Revamped interface, mail, imagination, and more
• Progress Report: April Releases
• Bigger, Better, Brighter
• Progress Report
• Glitch HQ updated — and now on Android!
• Progress Report: March Testing Release
• The Big Unlaunching
• Our One Month Anniversary
• Zombies and Shakespeare: Happy Zilloween!
• Why it's taking you so long to get an invite