Not only do I love games, but I also love fashion, sneakers, 3D modeling, and graphic design. These few projects are the perfect collision of all of those passions. I had the pleasure of creating MassVR dev team merch (the team voted on a bunch of my designs I’ll show below) and two sets of custom sneakers (one for MassVR team members and one for the game that got me into level design as a child) complete with 3D-printed hang-tags and lace dubraes, branded extra lace bags, and custom box branding.

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Custom Sneaker Design and Creation

I’m what you’d unfortunately call a “sneakerhead,” so when I realized one of the most iconic trainers of all time, the Air Max 90, was available to customize on Nike’s “By You” program, I simply had to tackle two of my favorite side projects I’ve ever done. Those were Atmosphir-inspired and MassVR-inspired sneakers, complete with all the extras any fellow sneakerhead would expect from a good collaboration!

MassVR x Nike Air Max 90

I started with some mockups I created by importing the Nike By You images into Illustrator and overlaying the design changes I wanted to make:

Then I gauged interest from the rest of the team and came away with 6 additional orders, so it was off to the races! Now I began to brainstorm what more to do to make these feel really special, and settled on MassVR-ifying the typical sneaker collab accoutrements: special boxes, extra laces, lace-locks, hang-tags, and lace dubraes.

Below are the models for the hang-tags and lace dubraes I created in Maya and later (successfully!) 3D-printed with the LulzBot we have in the office:

The LulzBot cranking away:

Once these were printed out I painted the logos of the hang-tags and personalized them for each person who ordered a pair:

Then I designed a variety of MassVR-related vector art in Adobe Illustrator to put on the lace bags and shoe boxes. These I printed on sticker paper and cut out with scissors—a full set of everything for all 7 pairs!

These stickers, extra laces, and lace-locks all reference various parts of our work at MassVR—the red vs. blue of VR Champions, the purple safety grid that prevents player collisions in our VR arenas, the electric green of Hallow Realm‘s branding, and the colors of MassVR’s logo.

These inspirations show up directly on the shoes as well! Using the Cricut vinyl cutter we have at the office I was able to cut out the vinyl logos I’d designed in Illustrator. These I later applied to the sneakers with a careful heat application, and they’ve yet to come off anyone’s pairs!

Once the shoes arrived it was time to put the finishing touches on!

Atmosphir x Nike Air Max 90

Atmosphir is what inspired me to make game development my career! Users could create and share levels built from simple and intuitive blocks and props. It was a contemporary of early Roblox closely predated Alpha Minecraft. Unfortunately, we all know who won out in the end!

Despite the game being long-defunct, it will forever live on in my heart. So I made a tribute to this seminal game in shoe form, much like the MassVR Air Maxes! These Atmosphir shoes actually predate the MassVR ones but the process was very similar, so I won’t go into too much detail.

I used a Cricut vinyl cutter to create the heat-applied logos to the sides of the shoe and the stencil I used to paint “Linden” the burgundy bird mascot of Minor Studios on the tongue. The extra laces and box customizations were inspired by the many logo changes the game underwent, and their graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator (I hunted down and vectorized all the old branding assets).

A total of four pairs of these Atmosphir shoes exist: one for me and three for the game’s three core developers (infinite gratitude to Dave Werner, Martin Repetto, and Maximo Radice—without you I perhaps would have never found my calling).

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MassVR Merch Design

2021 Dev Team Merch

The dev team expanded to 10 people in 2021! With double the team members, I wanted to create some new merch that could show appreciation to everyone new and old. I designed all of the iterations and mockups in Adobe Illustrator, took votes and orders from the team, and worked with a local print shop to get them all made out of my own pocket. Here’s a look at the process:

First, I started playing around with designs and mocking them up on various tee shirts:

These are the various designs (front and back) and possible garment colors I eventually asked the team to pick from:

After much consternation, the team decided on the logo/text combo on the front and the arena diagram on the back. Below is the final result!

Making this merch was an absolute blast and seeing my teammates wear it regularly brings me great joy!

2020 Dev Team Hoodie

I also designed a hoodie for the MassVR dev team—which was just 5 of us at the time—back in February of 2020 (AKA back in the golden days). Some of my early mockups from Adobe Illustrator are below:

The print shop we used was unfortunately unable to print on the sleeves of hoodies, so I moved that detail to the bottom of the back and this is the real world result:

Knockout Nights Tournament Tees

Back in 2019 I also made some “jerseys” for the dev team in the VR Champions tournaments we used to host. These we designed and created in the span of just a few hours with the use of Adobe Illustrator, a Cricut vinyl cutter, and an iron (to apply the vinyl patterns). I’ve since lost the original Illustrator file, but here’s a photo of me competing in it against the tournament winners: