Concept
On Rokus, a product that lets you watch streaming services on your TV, there is a screensaver called “Roku City”. It depicts a neofuturistic city-scape that is filled with movie references.
This has proven to be popular, as it is very detailed, there are hidden things to find, and it is nice to look at. For Gawker, Olivia Craighead wrote:
Roku City haunts me. What would it be like to live in such a place, where there is peace in one borough while just a river away there is mass hysteria and a giant robot is terrorizing the masses.”
I, like her and many others, have spent a lot of time imagining what life would be like in this fictional city. However, eventually, it becomes harder to discern anything more about the city, what you see is what you get As a DND dungeon master, the natural next step is to start making up lore to fill in. As I started to think about what the various facets of daily life would be in Roku City, I remembered TikToks that I had seen about something called the “FSL” or “Fake Sports League”. People would cheer for a made-up team in a made-up “league” where the results are randomly generated, and it’s not important what “sport” is pretending to be played. With this as my inspiration, I asked myself the question:
What if Roku City had a sports team?
And thus the project was born.
Team Name and Design Style(and some more influences)
There were a couple of other key influences besides Dungeons and Dragons and the Fake Sports League.
Picking a sport and a name
The first thing I had to decide was what sport our team would play. I quickly settled on basketball, as the NBA has a history of unique jersey designs and branding that would let us get a little wacky while still feeling like we were as serious as a real team.
Next, the name had to be decided. I thought about many options, but my first principle was that the name should start with R to match the R in “Roku City”. This kind of alliteration is pretty uncommon among real sports teams, but I felt it gave our team a bit of that movie flair, as often movies have had alliterative sports team names. While thinking of names, I started to look towards real sports team names. When looking at the Carolina Hurricanes, I realized that it was pretty strange psychologically to name your sports team after a natural disaster.
However strange, I liked this, and luckily for us, there are no less than 6 calamities occurring in Roku City at all times. With this in mind, the choice was clear
ROKU CITY ROBOTS
Picking a design style
When it came to picking a design style, I had something in mind from the start.
In the 1990s, the Toronto Raptors had a jersey with a cartoon raptor dribbling a basketball. This jersey is widely appreciated by NBA fans today, and was made iconic by the play of Vince Carter, so this jersey provided a great template to emulate as far as the level of wackiness. We would go for something that featured the robot front and center in a cartooney, almost ironically serious style to match the semi-irony of the internet fascination with Roku City.
We would also feature 6 stars somewhere on the jersey, one for each currently ongoing natural disaster/calamity occurring in Roku City at all times.
Process
Designing the Jersey
Teaming up with my good friend and talented illustrator Katey Conklinn, we went from my concept sketches and pictures of real basketball players to a drawn version in a couple of iterations.
More to come in this section in the future.
Printing the Jersey
In my research, I found that the company with the most ability to print custom jerseys was an EU company called Spized. Their online configurator provided a surprising level of adjustability and the jersey quality is very high
The Finished Jersey
Front(With side panel pixel design shown)
Back of Jersey
