GoKawiilWhat's your game called and what's it about?
Jonathan: Dressmaker is a game about making dresses, where almost every part of the creative process is under your control: from design, choosing fabrics for each panel, sewing it together and finishing it off with trims, buttons, bows and other accessories. You can make commissioned dresses for a town of women with different tastes and aesthetics, or you can make your own off-rack dresses to sell.
How big is the development team?
Anja: The full-time core development team from Free Lives is only 3 people (Ruan Rothman, Sara Laubscher, Jonathan) alongside our sound designer Jason Sutherland who is currently working on about four projects at the same time. Sabrina has been the vision holder for the project, and has consulted on and quality-assessed all of the game design decisions. External contractors have included Kerstin Hall, our writer, and Meydän, our composer. There has been amazing support from the wider Free Lives machine — additional art and design, production and media/community support. Then there have also been amazing friends that have jumped in to help when things got overwhelming on the footage capture and QA fronts.
How long have you been working on it?
Jonathan: We began the first playable prototype in July 2025, uploading it to itch.io to see if there was an audience for the game. After a month or so of deliberation, it was greenlit by Free Lives in September 2025.
Cozy Lives
What's the origin story of Dressmaker?
Jonathan: Sabrina and I have been dating for over seven years. When we first met, she was wearing a dress that she'd made herself. Over the years, I've learnt a lot about clothing from her. She points out costume changes in movies and how they support the story, tells me whether they're historically accurate, clever modifications they made to make a historical design work for the world they've created. She'd tell me about the huge environmental impact of fast fashion, of polyester and other synthetic fibers, and lament at the skills that were being lost with the ability to mend and customize clothing becoming less common. She introduced me to a number of YouTube dress historians and dressmakers, and opened my eyes to the enormous community of people who love the craft.
There's this excitement, energy and creativity in that community that I found so beautiful, and I wondered what that would be like in game form, where someone might be able to have some of the creative expression of making custom dresses without having to buy machines and fabrics and be cutting fabric out on their hands and knees on the floor.
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