Story

I have a small group of friends that like to play Minecraft together fairly regularly. Over the years, one of the friends would make us matching skins for certain occasions, all using a site called needcoolshoes.com. However, come 2023, needcoolshoes went offline for good, and suddenly my friend had lost his favourite skin making tool.

Wanting him to make a particular skin set for our group, I dug the old editor out of the Wayback Machine, and fixed it up to function as before. I put it up on a static site, then shared it with him, as well as commenting the link on a few Reddit threads asking about needcoolshoes.com. My restoration started to gain traction, and soon I had multiple people asking me to add back the gallery, so they could share their skins like on the old site.

Being a Rails developer, I spun up a basic Rails app, using my restored version of the editor, and implementing a basic gallery. I named it needcoolershoes (which helped it replace the old site on search engines). From there, the site kept growing in traction, and more and more features were requested and implemented. However, people were requesting features of the skin editor itself, which at this point was an amalgamation of obfuscated archived javascript, and some patches I had made to add some basic features. Eventually, maintaining this editor became a hassle, and paired with the fact that I didn't technically have the rights to modify and distribute it, I decided to rewrite it from scratch.

Now, two years on, myself and a few others who joined the community have fully rewritten the editor, using Lit for webcomponents, but otherwise sticking mostly to vanilla Javascript. Three JS is used for the 3D rendering. The editor is now fully mobile responsive, with touch controls, and portrait oriented UI, but switches to a landscape oriented desktop UI for larger screens. As well, it now supports modern skins, with transparency, and slim model support.

One of the members of the community made a trailer which shows off some of the editor's features, which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InOz7jUmhcI

Really appreciate anyone here in to Minecraft checking out needcoolershoes, it has been a real passion project the last few years, and the site runs free with no ads, hosting funded by donations. Also appreciate it if anyone shares this with people they know that are in to Minecraft, we love seeing new skins being submitted to the site!