What’s your sport referred to as and what’s it about?
Jonathan: Dressmaker is a sport about making clothes, the place nearly each a part of the artistic course of is beneath your management: from design, selecting materials for every panel, stitching it collectively and ending it off with trims, buttons, bows and different equipment. You may make commissioned clothes for a city of ladies with completely different tastes and aesthetics, or you can also make your personal off-rack clothes to promote.
How massive is the event group?
Anja: The total-time core growth group from Free Lives is barely 3 folks (Ruan Rothman, Sara Laubscher, Jonathan) alongside our sound designer Jason Sutherland who’s at the moment engaged on about 4 initiatives on the similar time. Sabrina has been the imaginative and prescient holder for the mission, and has consulted on and quality-assessed the entire sport design choices. Exterior contractors have included Kerstin Corridor, our author, and Meydän, our composer. There was wonderful assist from the broader Free Lives machine — further artwork and design, manufacturing and media/group assist. Then there have additionally been wonderful buddies which have jumped in to assist when issues obtained overwhelming on the footage seize and QA fronts.
How lengthy have you ever been engaged on it?
Jonathan: We started the primary playable prototype in July 2025, importing it to itch.io to see if there was an viewers for the sport. After a month or so of deliberation, it was greenlit by Free Lives in September 2025.
Cozy Lives
What is the origin story of Dressmaker?
Jonathan: Sabrina and I’ve been courting for over seven years. Once we first met, she was carrying a costume that she’d made herself. Through the years, I’ve learnt loads about clothes from her. She factors out costume adjustments in films and the way they assist the story, tells me whether or not they’re traditionally correct, intelligent modifications they made to make a historic design work for the world they’ve created. She’d inform me concerning the big environmental impression of quick vogue, of polyester and different artificial fibers, and lament on the abilities that had been being misplaced with the flexibility to fix and customise clothes turning into much less widespread. She launched me to plenty of YouTube costume historians and dressmakers, and opened my eyes to the big group of people that love the craft.
There’s this pleasure, vitality and creativity in that group that I discovered so lovely, and I questioned what that will be like in sport kind, the place somebody would possibly have the ability to have among the artistic expression of constructing customized clothes with out having to purchase machines and materials and be slicing material out on their palms and knees on the ground.
So throughout my trip after delivery the arid replace to Terra Nil, I made a really primary prototype of Dressmaker, the place you organize patterns on material, rotate them to the grain line (or not, if you did not have sufficient material), and minimize the items out. I added a 3D model that you possibly can drag the items onto to see your costume as a 3D mannequin. After which a pal inspired me to make a Tiktok video about simply that, although I did not suppose there was a lot there but.
The video itself obtained some 600,000-plus views throughout TikTok and Instagram, and was stuffed with feedback of individuals asking what the secret was and the place they may play it. However at this level the sport barely existed, and did not also have a title!
I knew that if I continued engaged on this with Sabrina as a interest mission it will take years to make it something like the sport that we imagined it to be. So I took it to Free Lives, and along with Ruan and Sara, we spent three weeks making a extra fleshed-out prototype that was truly a playable sport and put that on itch.io. The sport obtained round 30,000 downloads in its first month, which is normally fairly good, however not anyplace near a few of our different profitable video games’ numbers. However the feedback had been so passionate — gamers had been sharing their costume creations, typing up essays about how a lot they liked it and making ideas, and we had a number of content material creators’ movies concerning the sport recover from one million views. This was lastly sufficient for Free Lives to offer the go-ahead for us to make it right into a full sport.
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Sabrina, how has residing with a power sickness affected your artistic course of or perspective?
Sabrina: I’ve needed to acknowledge once I’m in a flare-up, and the way I’ve to take the day off and get well. I’ve needed to settle for that work will occur extra slowly, and that there are specific issues I am not in a position to do. I’ve to work inside ever-changing parameters to guarantee that I am listening to my physique and taking relaxation the place I would like it; as a result of if I do not, it means I will not have the ability to do any work in any respect.
It may be actually irritating and actually tough as a result of I can really feel like I am letting folks down. However I am additionally actually lucky that I work with great people who find themselves understanding and supportive, and are in a position to catch issues that fall by the cracks. I’ve even had buddies are available to assist on the mission!
Discuss concerning the mechanical and technical depth of Dressmaker — it appears extremely intricate.
Jonathan: There’s the 3D model of a costume that lives on the model, and the 2D model of every of its items that’s used for slicing out material. That is just like doing UV unwrapping in conventional 3D software program: Wherever you place the sample on the material is strictly what seems on the costume. However the place UV unwraps are normally completed to attenuate distortion or for simple packing, these UVs need to be completed to look plausibly equal to real-world costume patterns, so Sara’s needed to do a variety of handbook unwrapping to get them to look proper. The meshes additionally need to be fairly exact, because the sport wants to have the ability to determine the place the seams between panels are for stitching, the place seam allowance needs to be, and the place to attract the markings for seam allowance and grain alignment.
Sizing provides an additional layer of complexity. Standardized sizing is a fantasy, and we attempt to present a model of this together with your taking measurements of every buyer and adjusting your model to match. We use a lattice to vary the model and costume sizes, however doing this naively with out additionally adjusting the 2D patterns would trigger the materials to look stretched. We had to determine the right way to make the 2D patterns have the ability to adapt to the sized clothes to attenuate stretching. In some instances that is very tough (like when the ultimate costume has gathered edges), however we do the very best we will.
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Why are cozy video games so scorching proper now, do you suppose?
Jonathan: It is surprisingly arduous to outline what makes a sport “cozy”. Even when I consider it as being non-violent, I can nonetheless consider highly regarded cozy examples that have you ever killing monsters in mines, beating cultists within the woods or elevating chickens to feed to slimes. However perhaps there are extra builders which are extra deliberately making video games for girls.
What is the vibe across the South African indie scene these days? The area has produced some massive indie hits just lately, Free Lives video games included.
Anja: I feel the South African indie scene is genuinely up-and-coming. A whole lot of our buddies within the worldwide indie communities in Europe and the US have commented that it seems like we’re getting into one thing of a golden age right here. There are common meet-ups, jams and group occasions occurring, it has been rising yearly, and there is only a large quantity of expertise and potential ready to be unlocked.
At Free Lives, we take a really “ubuntu” strategy to the entire thing: You are solely pretty much as good as your group. The success we have had with video games like Broforce and GORN gave us the chance to place some cash and vitality again into the ecosystem that supported us, and we have tried to be fairly intentional about doing that.
Free Lives is the first funder of the Playtopia Basis, which runs Playtopia, an annual indie video games pageant, in addition to supporting our native alt-controller group by Tremendous Friendship Arcade. We additionally fund the Maker’s Huge, a Discord and bodily group area the place builders can meet up, jam and work collectively without cost. We have already spent R3 million on the Jam Dole — a stipend that offers younger South African builders the respiratory room to prototype with out having to sacrifice an revenue or give away their IP — which has had an unbelievable return on funding by way of group development.
We’re already seeing some actually thrilling outcomes. In simply the previous two years, video games like Get Yoked, Detective Turner, Feather’s Edge and Fossil Quest have come by that program. And we’re actively in search of collaborators to make that program extra sustainable.
If anybody is inquisitive about what’s occurring in South African indie video games, come to Playtopia. It is more and more one of many final stands of a radically open, unbiased and non-corporatized pageant tradition — and I feel it’s important to expertise that group in particular person to essentially perceive what’s occurring right here.
Why are video video games your chosen type of expression?
Jonathan: I grew up having fun with a variety of various things, from maths and physics to artwork and music. Video video games really feel like they’ll make use of all or any of these issues, no matter your pursuits are — even dressmaking. And there is all the time a lot extra to study, in order that I discover I am by no means bored.
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What is the greatest roadblock you’ve got confronted as a smaller developer?
Jonathan: I feel by far a very powerful downside to unravel is what sport to work on: an concept that has attraction, that may be scoped in such a means that it may be executed properly sufficient with the group dimension and cash you have got out there. Pursuing a mission that’s too formidable for the sources out there is one thing that would simply tank a studio. We attempt to make a variety of small prototypes, and solely pursue those that present us we may feasibly make the total sport in an affordable timeframe with a hungry viewers. However we’re additionally determining what different methods we will attempt to validate concepts, like testing issues on social media.
What can bigger corporations and publishers do to higher assist builders like your self?
Jonathan: Anja’s talked about the Jam Dole, which is among the most sensible methods I’ve seen for serving to small builders determine the correct video games to pursue. The Jam Dole’s mannequin is loosely just like how we prototype and validate concepts internally. I would like to see this system broaden.
Let’s carry it again house. Promote your sport in a single sentence:
Make the clothes you’ve got all the time dreamed of — in Dressmaker, coming to PC and Mac on Steam on 21 September!
Cozy Lives
Take a look at the Engadget Indie Pitch archive:
