Welcome! This guide assumes you understand the basics of a 3d modeling program and a little bit about the hat in time editor, if there's anything I could do or add to make this easier to follow just let me know! For the sake of blender being its own challenge I'll try to provide better resources than what can be explained via text.
If this is your first time working with Hat's class file system, don't fret, you can open a .uc file withe notepad++[notepad-plus-plus.org], which is what I'll be using in the guide!

The first step in creating a playable character is to get Hat Kids Skeleton from the editor!

Once the editor is open, under the Preferences tab at the top of the screen be sure to disable simplified editor




then in the content browser look for



from here drag the model into the scene and double click it to open the properties and look up in the search tab location, set the location to 0,0,0 so that it is at the world origin.



From here you can right click Hat Kid's head in the scene and export as fbx. you can just name this file whatever.

I recommend using blender to import the model, as this is what this guide will mostly follow,
Make sure when import to enable ignore leaf bones.





From here I recommend following through this amazing guide by Classytimes to fix the skeleton on blender import.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2344379306&searchtext=skeleton

Next, import your model, (Note that if your model is a .blend you'll want to open that file first then import the Hat Kid fbx), you'll want to align and scale your model to be roughly the size of Hat Kid,

Once your model is scaled to your liking select your model then hold shift and click the skeleton bones, then press ctrl and p and select with Empty Groups.



With those assigned I recommend following a weight painting tutorial if you're unfamiliar with the process, as it is different for every model, I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4qTgwQwYw

This is often considered the worst part of making a playable as it can take a long time to get everything just right, but don't be discouraged and take breaks if needed!

If you want this playable to support costumes then split the model into 3 parts for the head, body, and legs. You'll want to export each piece separately, additionally exporting one "full body" model with all pieces together. This is called the Three Mesh Playable, because you use three pieces, and because it will be able to support costumes unlike one fullbody mesh.

I'll cover the differences in scripting in two separate sections, as the process is largely similar for the two but with some differences.

(Hi quick note! I got kinda lazy here and don't have any easy to use player models I can upload for hat, so I'll just be using 3 cubes that define the 3 different body parts, thanks in advance!)

Once you're ready to put everything into the content browser, there's 2 main ways to import your models and textures into the content browser.

The first method is by just dragging and dropping into the content browser, and changing the import package name, most often it's a prefix followed by the player name (In this case I'll be using Kido_CubePlayer)


The other method is to click the Import button and select each file individually, also changing the package name.


Common issue


The easiest fix for this is to save your texture as a TGA, also be sure that the size of the image is a power of 2,

(anything past 4096 is excessive), most common texture size being 512x512 or 1024x1024

For each texture you've imported, the next step is to create a material.
Right click anywhere in the background of the content browser and create a new material, one for each texture.


Next click on All Assets, and search for
then drag and drop it into the Material as shown below


Next click on the grey main node in the center, and change the Blend Mode to Masked and Lighting Model to PBR. then connect the nodes as seen in the picture below


Then, you'll want to return to your package and drag the texture into the material, and connect the Purple output into the Diffuse slot.

The end result should look like this, feel free to mess around and add more flair to it if you so desire!


Repeat these steps for each texture you have.

More more in-depth materials with dyability I recommend reading this guide

Once each texture has been created we'll want to apply it to the models.
First right click one of the materials and Copy Full Name to Clipboard.
Double click on the model and look in the bottom left, look for a tab called Materials and paste the material you copied before into the proper slot.



Do this for each model, don't let the lighting of the material in the preview deceive you, it'll look a lot better in-game.

Sockets are very "trial and error" based, these define where hats and other attachments should go on the player, to add these we'll first need to go back to instead of placing this in the world we'll want to open it, and find the red trapezoid button in the top left


With this open we'll want to copy all the sockets into our own model, find but button that looks like scissors


from here we'll want to go back to our model (The head mesh if we're setting up a model that uses the three parts), go into the socket editor and this time click the clipboard to paste


I'll try to run through every socket and what it is in a table here, you can assign a preview mesh my pasting a mesh into Preview Skel Mesh or Preview Static Mesh, depending on the prefix.

You can also import and additional texture for the player icon, it'll be used when a co-op player is too far away from you, or when using this mod. To do so import your players icon as you did with the player textures, ensuring that it is a power of 2. We'll reference this file later in script.

Back in blender we're going to want to pose our model how we want to see the ice statue in-game
If you don't know how to pose I reccomend watching some guides on youtube, as it's not that hard of a concept, but explaining it in text can be difficult, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLSquDzNar8

Once you've posed the model to you liking you'll want to do a few things,


We'll want to go back into object mode and select our model, then press ctrl+a, and apply all transforms.


Go into the model's Modifiers tab, and apply the skeletal mesh,


With that applied you should be able to delete the skeleton, the only major thing to do with the model is to merge all the materials into one, as the editor will only use one,


Another thing people will do to add some "flair" is make it shaded flat as to follow what the ingame ones look like, and decimate the model to make it lower poly,


Some people will also add a baseplate like Hat Kid and Bow Kid have, when you're ready, export the model as an fbx and you can import that into the editor, into your package, we'll use this in script later!

Most of the Scripts for playable characters is copying and pasting, I'll provide a template playable character files for pasting into here[drive.google.com]

A One-Mesh playable is useful for those who would rather just have one model that doesn't support costumes (can still support dyes if setup), most commonly used if the character is a port of a character from another game.

I'll only go over what to replace here, and provide a more in-depth walk through on functions and what they do in the script itself!

any instance of [PLAYERNAME] needs to be renamed to whatever your players name is, for example my character here is Cube Player, so the first Kido_Player_[PLAYERNAME] would be Kido_Player_CubePlayer, avoid using spaces or non-alphabetic characters.

Do note that the file name should match what what the first line defines the class as, for example if my class is named Kido_Player_CubePlayer, it should be named Kido_Player_CubePlayer.uc




With a simple one-mesh playable the only other replacement we need to define is the model itself,
in the editor right click the player model and select Copy Full Name to Clipboard, then in the script you can paste it in the spots marked [PLAYERMESH]

For example my CubePlayer model is





If you added any of the Extra Goodies from above there's still a few more steps!
We'll want to rename the [PLAYERNAME] like above, the [ICON] will be our texture from the editor we imported earlier. like the model we'll right click the texture and Copy Full Name to Clipboard, mine looks something like


If you imported an ice statue model before, you can copy its full name from the editor and paste it in [ICESTATUE]

Nyoom Kaboom, sounds are a vital part to expressing a characters emotions! (unless you're Link or Kirby of course)

If you wish for the player to stay mute you can always remove the // before the overrides


























If you want to use custom sounds you can also import wav files into hat and create Sound Cues

Like how we imported our player we can import the sound files the same way!
While importing tick the Auto Create Cue checkbox,








From here we can right click the newly created Audio Cue and paste it over the None in script, like below



I'd like to create a more indepth guide on how the sounds in hat work with things like randomization between sounds and whatnot, but for the sake of my sanity this is all for now!

( o｀ω′)ノExpress yourself!

Expressions are a big part of making a playable character unique and interesting,

[INSERT MATERIAL SETUP HERE FOR FACE AND EYES]



The Expression component template can be found here[drive.google.com].

The only notable thing worth changing is that FaceIndex and EyeIndex need to be changed to match your characters material indexes, if you don't use one of them set it to -1.

In the Player class in the Default Properties be sure to also change the Indexies there and add
Like shown below



as well as in ConvertNPCPlayer changing
into
like shown below

Adding a hub swapper can seem difficult, but it's just about placement!

With the editor, you'll want to open the hub map so we can find where we'll want to place our player
the map can be found in
When you open the map you may see some errors and warnings, you can safely ignore those,
You may notice that the map is all dark, don't fret, you'll just want to enable unlit mode in the editor by finding the set of boxes in the top left, look for the brightest one and click that,


From here you can use your player model, or and place it in the scene,

You can press space to swap between location, rotation, and scale, when placing,
once you've found your desired location double click the model to open the properties and look up location,


Copy this XYZ location somewhere important, as we'll use this later

After that you'll want to search up Rotation and do the same thing, save it somewhere important,


Next we'll create the conversation trees for when you interact with your player, and when you swap back as player 1 and 2.
Going back to our content package we'll want to right click and create three new Conversation Trees,


Each tree should have 4 parts, starting the with base Root node already


To add a new node right click anywhere in the tree, you'll want to create 1
Hat_ConversationNodeChoice and 2 Hat_ConversationNodeContinues, when connecting each node it will give a list of options, choose Hat_ConversationLink


Then click the light blue Choice Node and on the bottom tab next to message write the "Swap to" message,

A list of writing effects that can be used can be found here[cdn.discordapp.com]. Written by the wonderful Werti and Habijob.

Then right click the output green node and you should be presented with 2 "Standard Link" options,


Select the top option and on the bottom you can set the "Fine Name", The top option is always the "Yes" option, the bottom is always the "No" option.


Once you have all three conversation trees done,
one for swapping to your player
one for swapping to player one (Hat Kid)
one for swapping to player two (Bow Kid)
we can begin writing the scripts!

You can of course nab the templates from here[drive.google.com] under the Hub Swapper folder

You'll want to rename all of the [PLAYERNAME] lines to be your players name that you've used in the other class files,
You'll want to replace the X Y and Z and the Roll Pitch and Yaw with the values you copied earlier, for the Roll Pitch and Yaw leave *DG as that converts the rotation to be proper in-game.

An example,


Sometimes people will copy the rotation from the editor and it will add a degree symbol to the end, be sure to remove it before posting it into the class file or else the compile will fail later on.

Replace the [PLAYERNAME] with your player's name like above,
alongside copying your playermesh like you did in the player class into the [PLAYERMESH] spot.

However in this file we also need to do two additional things, in the editor copy the fullname of the conversation tree to swap to our custom player and paste this in the spot of [CONVOTREE PLAYER], as well as replacing the [ANIMNAME] with what idle animation we want the player to use when idle, you can find the animations inside , however the most common idle is just called 'Idle'

replace [PLAYERNAME] like in every file,
in _Undo you'll want to replace [CONVOTREE PLAYER1] with your convo tree to swap to player 1 or Hat Kid.
in _Undo2 you'll want to replace [CONVOTREE PLAYER2] with your convo tree to swap to player 2 or Bow Kid.

Lastly replace the [ANIMNAME] with your chosen idle animation name from above

With the three Playerswapper classes setup and the PlayerMod file, you're ready to continue!

This is the fun part, the part where we get to see all of our hard work pay off and our creation come to life!

Assuming you haven't already, you'll want to create a New Mod in the Mod Manager,

From Here you can set the Mod Name and Mod Folder, Note: The mod folder cannot be the same name as your content package we created earlier

You'll then want to open the mod folder by clicking the Browse Mod button.


In this folder we'll want to make 2 Subfolders, one named Classes and one named Content


You'll want to put any .uc files in the Classes folder
Likewise .upk files should be placed in the Content folder


Once we have our files moved we can go back to our mod in the Mod Manager and click the icon that looks like a console, if the screen says that "No script files, no need to compile scripts!" click the Refresh button below it, and click Compile Scripts.


If you've done everything properly you should have No errors!
There's a few warnings that may occur but most can be safely ignored, the only major ones to keep an eye out for is a missing object reference, in which you want to make sure your content package is in the correct place and that you copied the correct name.

NOTE: if you click into this window and select text it will freeze the log, if it seems to be taking an oddly long amount of time to compile make sure you don't accidentally have something selected!

Once the log is done compiling you'll want to close out of that window and in the mod manager go to the tab that looks like a rocket ship, in there we'll want to click the Cook Mod button


Another small pop-out window should appear, like above clicking and selecting will freeze it so be certain to not do that.

The finished product will look similar to the above, you might get warnings for missing content from other mods, you can safely ignore those here!

From here we'll want to test the mod as we see fit, Do note that using the "Test Mod" button will only load local mods and not workshop mods, just boot the game normally and all mods will be loaded


Once you've tested to your hearts content and are ready to upload we can add an icon to the mod, an icon can be any image that is a square and less than 1mb in size! To do this click the button that looks like a holographic sticker of a silhouette,


Once we've done that we can click the Save Changes button and the Submit to Steam Workshop as Playable Mod button should be available, Once you click that the mod will begin to upload, if you get Success! then congratulations!

If you get an error it could be a few things, a Steam UGC error means that you need to open the modding tools via steam, or that steam servers are down.

If you are updating the mod make sure the patch notes only use letters and numbers, common practice is just make the patch notes a single letter, then change it from steam itself!

If there's anything that I could do better or just need help understanding how a part is done don't be afraid to shoot me a message on discord: Crash#3972 or my steam.

There's also the wonderful community of Hatcord[discord.gg] where you can ask in the modding help chats!