How I Designed a Game Around Streetwear
I started with a T-shirt design and no real plan. Somewhere along the way it became a world, a card game and a comic and an alternate reality streetwear game. Here’s how I built a game around streetwear.
Geometric Eye was the first design that I drew for the Teemill store. I had no idea what kind of store I was building, other than sustainable. I knew I wanted it to be different.
At that stage I was cycling between everything from 90s retro symbols to geometric animals with no decisions. I knew I wanted to use my old art.
The first design, the geometric eye sketch and printed version.
Redesigning 20yr old characters
I took some of my old characters, drawings and sketches and put them in the store. I didn’t have a reason why. Some I redesigned slightly, and some I kept the same.
These became Logic, Tenet, Ultraviolet and Sun Eater.
Gradually, as I added more art, illegible to all but to me, the world was emerging.
Their stories were unfolding.
The characters were evolving and before I knew it I had a psychostasia judge, a slightly too experimental planet builder, an intergalactic backpacker who stopped by for the music and bubble wrap and an intergalactic star maggot who is happily munching on dying stars.
Unfortunately, that last one is heading toward ours.
Mapping game to garment
That was really the easy part. I researched different ways games communicate rules, worlds, progression, player behaviour, consequence and more, across wildly different games and media, and then figured out what my existing world could mechanically do.
What happened to sustainability?
I leaned heavily into sustainability messaging those first few months and discovered then that sustainability on its own wasn’t going to move the needle. I had to make it worthwhile. Mean something.
One of the biggest things we do is circularity. And it’s one of the last things we do as people.
So I built recycling into the game twice. In play, Recycle undoes your opponent's last move. Outside the game, the same idea continues through the clothes: scan the QR code in the care label, return the garment when you're finished with it, and it goes back into the system to become something else.
I’m not claiming I’ve solved the problem, but I am trying to make participation part of the thing.
Alternate Reality Streetwear Game
The clothes are the artifacts. The cards are where you play. The comics are where the characters come alive.
Different parts of the same world.
Game to garment
The cards and the artifacts (clothing) are now coherent. The final designs are being added over the next few weeks.
Next, I'll be finishing the cards and working on getting them into the hands of our testers.
If you would like to test the game, you can find out more here.
This One's For The Underdogs
Not the word. The actual thing. Mongrel Logic was built for the ones who were too loud, too quiet, too weird, too much, and still showed up.
Not the word. The actual thing, Mongrel Logic.
The kids who cleared hallways just by existing. The ones who were too loud, too quiet, too weird, too much, not enough. The ones who got their lunch money taken and their ideas ignored and still showed up the next day with something to prove.
Mongrel Logic, built for the underdogs. Lex the dog, brand mascot and co-founder.
That's who Mongrel Logic is for
Not because it's a good marketing angle. Because it's where this came from. I am the weirdo. The loner. The underdog mongrel who will not stop once it sets its mind on something. I built this because I had to and I built it for the people who understand that feeling without needing it explained.
Metal heads. Hip hop heads. Underground everything. People who'd like to see the world work better and have quietly stopped waiting for permission. People who don't need external validation and have learned to survive without it even when they do.
You don't wear Mongrel Logic to fit in
You wear it because you stopped trying to. The street is the catwalk. Always has been. We just build like we know it.
Growing pains.
A raw reflection on six months of building Mongrel Logic™ - sustainable streetwear, organic growth, and endurance in obscurity.
Short. Punchy. Honest.
Close-up macro of a sewing needle with threads under tension.
I love building Mongrel Logic. We are officially into our 6th month as a start-up, on zero budget, that’s just a fact. Although, I look forward to it becoming a historical fact one day. Just saying, I still do the day job as well.
Time has lost all meaning.
Work never stops. There is no such thing as a day off. I’m not complaining, there are just many elements to what I am building. Organic business growth exclusively in our first year is just one of them, which is partly why time has lost all meaning.
Social media has taken over my life.
Days are spent agonising over content I have, knowing more needs to be done, having barely any time to do that, but needing to push on even if it’s not perfect. Even if I haven’t got everything I need. Which is an extremely frustrating problem to have, but essential at this point and an on-going process.
The reel story.
Sorry…The real story is I care about all this. I was born in Africa, I live in the UK. I’ve lived both sides of the solution and the problem. But this blog isn’t about waste. Nor about extremely good quality clothing for an exceptional price. (Shameless plug.)
I draw incredibly weird shit, mythical cosmic world builders, sun eaters, South African crime fighting superheroes, lots of eyeballs. It’s about using creativity to build a way forward. Said every artist ever.
I’m not afraid, to t…struggle in obscurity.
Persistence in the dark. Being unseen until the world is ready. The undertow, the liminality. A lone wolf. Gestating in the undercurrent of, ok, I’ll stop. World domination loading.
Endurance.
Not just a tag line. An essential ingredient to the first year, an ethos, a mindset, an inner vision and outward expression of what it means to live where design chaos and craft collide and what it means to think that survival deserves to be worn.