The wonderful thing about gaming is that it can be a virtual gateway for people to fulfil dreams that would otherwise be impossible. In Sabrina Becker's case, she has always had a deep passion for dresses and fashion history, but being diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, prevented her from being able to pursue costume design professionally.
"I grew up sewing with my mom, so Dressmaker has been a really lovely way for me to reconnect with that," she tells me. Becker and her partner Jonathan Hau-Yoon are the co-creators of Dressmaker, an indie game all about making dresses. In other words, not like all the countless fashion and dress-up games that already exist but one where every element of making the dress, from choosing fabric, cutting out patterns, sewing garments, and adding decorations, is under your control.
"We really wanted to make sure we made a game about craft and creativity," Becker continues. "There's nothing more exciting than when you go into the fabric store, and you see all of these materials, and there are so many endless possibilities that you can think of with combinations and styles and cuts. It's really getting to put those things together and make your own vision that I find so satisfying, and we wanted to bring that through in the game."
But even with Becker's fashion expertise and Hau-Yoon's decade-long game dev experience primarily at Free Lives, the developer and publisher of Dressmaker, it was still a challenge to think of how to make a fun and engaging dressmaking game rather than become a full-on simulation such as Marvelous Designer. "Whenever Sabrina and I talked about making clothes, it would be about spending so much time cutting out fabric and so much time doing the sewing, which is actually quite tedious, but you're going to have something amazing at the end," he says.
Instead, Dressmaker started out as the couple's side project, initially with little more than a cutting table for fabric and later a mannequin onto which you could assemble the cut-out pieces. Conscious that the concept needed a better presentation, Hau-Yoon took a colleague's advice to make a TikTok video about it. "I spent an afternoon just recording some video and cutting it together, and that got like half a million views, and we didn't even have a name for the game," he recalls. "That's when I took the game to Free Lives, and then we spent three weeks making the very rough prototype that would be itch-friendly."
The Dressmaker prototype on itch.io (and it is still downloadable) was downloaded 40,000 times in its first month, reaching 100,000 downloads after two months, which was evidence enough that it was a project worth pursuing for real. "It's how Free Lives has typically tested games in the past," Hau-Yoon explains. "We are often not very good judges of whether there's an audience for something, so if you put it up for free and people talk about it or make content, then that's a pretty good marker."
Arguably, the appeal of Dressmaker lies in how open it is as a creative playground, with the community still coming up with imaginative new dress designs from even the most basic prototype. Even though the final game is presented with a vintage-feeling setting, including a vintage Singer-style sewing machine and in-game characters illustrated with period-specific fashions, Becker clarifies that the game isn't set in a specific time period such as 18th-century Britain. "As soon as you do that, you limit the scope of what's possible and what would have existed at the time. So we have some design options that are very modern and some that are more historical, so that people can make whatever they want."
Whether it's making dresses inspired by impressionist paintings or decorated with over 10,000 individually placed buttons, your imagination's the limit in Dressmaker, which is also reflected in a direction to make the visuals more expressive than physically accurate. "With our sequins, for example, the sequins should look sparkly, so we're adding extra effects to make it sparkly," says Hau-Yoon. "We do think of it more as an artistic expression of what a fabric is rather than like everything being photorealistic."
It's also a considerable departure from some of the other games Free Lives has made, such as ultra-violent VR gladiatorial hack-and-slasher Gorn and FPS Anger Foot, and so Dressmaker is actually being developed under a different team label, Cozy Lives. Should Dressmaker prove as successful as the 100,000 downloads for the prototype suggest, we can only hope for more to come.
"We've had a lot of requests for Hat Maker," Becker adds.
To which Hau-Yoon replies, "If we do Shoe Maker and Hat Maker, then we can have a whole outfit. But I don't want to look too far into the future!"
Dressmaker releases on PC on 21 September. You can still download and play the original prototype on itch.io.
