Lucy recommends: Dressmaker

Hey folks, happy Friday! Hope you've had a lovely week and have some fun plans for the weekend. Or if like me, you have no plans and are just going to stew in the house and play games all weekend, well that sounds pretty great too.

Thank you for all the lovely feedback on Wednesday's bonus newsletter. In case you missed it, I wrote about the sad current state of games media after the recent cuts to places like IGN, and my experience of working in the field for some fifteen years. You can check it out here:

In lighter news, this week, I'm excited to be writing about Dressmaker: a truly charming game that has you play as, you guessed it, a dressmaker, as you create extravagant pieces of fashion for the locals. I spoke with its creators earlier this week, so make sure you read to the end for that really lovely chat.

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This week, paid LFG Supporters can enter into a giveaway to win a copy of TCG Card Shop Simulator. The game hit1.0 this week after a very successful Early Access run, and it's finally adding the playable Tetramon TCG! To enter, subscribe to LFG by hitting the button below, link your Discord account, and join in the #giveaways channel.

Entries close 2 pm PT on Sunday September 20.

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What is Dressmaker?

Make a name for yourself as the new dressmaker in town by fulfilling requests for the townsfolk. Take their measurements, draft patterns to their specific requirements, choose fabric and accessories, then sew it all together to make some fabulous outfits.

Why Dressmaker rules

Back in 2021, I became obsessed with The Great British Sewing Bee: a cousin show to The Great British Bake Off that swaps out baking for sewing. It's great! The vibes are pleasant, the judges are incredibly insightful (and dare I say, much kinder), and the creativity is off the charts. Through it, I became fascinated with the way garments are constructed, how fabric and pattern choices impact the final piece, and the history and politics of fashion over the years. It inspired me to buy a sewing machine to try it all out for myself. Maybe I wouldn't be drafting patterns right away, but I could at least start by tailoring my own clothes so they'd fit a bit nicer.

I like to consider myself a crafty person. I can knit, I can crochet and while the act of finishing those craft projects is perhaps a discussion for another day, I can do them. Sewing should be fine, right?

Right?

Well, like any skill, it's tough at first. You've got to thread bobbins and figure out tension, all while moving your fabric through at the right speed. God bless YouTube University, because I didn't have anyone around me to teach me these things. Eventually, I made a face mask, complete with pleats and elastic to hold it on my face. It wasn't good, but I did it. I drafted the pattern, I pressed the fabric (no one tells you just how much ironing you have to do when sewing), and I sewed it together. Proud doesn't even cut it. I was, to use a very British turn of phrase: proper chuffed.

But that's where my sewing journey ended. My life was uprooted, and the sewing machine sadly relegated to the back of my closet.

That is, until recently.

I'm still a fan of The Great British Sewing Bee, but a while ago, I saw TikToks of a game where you draft patterns, cut them out, and then sew it all together to make a dress. You've probably already guessed, but that game was Dressmaker. It neatly pulls together all the elements that I found really interesting about sewing, and surrounds it with a cozy aesthetic, gentle piano music, charming and memorable characters, and yes, a very cute shop cat*. The developers have really nailed the process and crucially, the feeling of sewing. The freedom to experiment with designs and fabric, the careful measuring and construction, and holding the space bar down to run the sewing machine as you carefully feed fabric through just feels... right. You get to take pictures of your creations, save your designs for other dresses, experiment with color combos, and sell your wares to customers. Thankfully the only part of the process missing is ironing, which I'm certainly not complaining about.

I was amazed at just how quickly I was understanding the basics of construction, how fitting pattern pieces on a limited amount of fabric activated the puzzle-loving side of me, and yes, just how proud I was when the finished garment not only looked great, but was well-received by its recipient.

Obviously, real-life sewing is a little harder than in Dressmaker, but playing the game has actually given me a renewed confidence in my ability to do it. Now that life has settled down a bit, I think it's time to get the sewing machine back out of the cupboard.

*Shop cat is, of course, based on the developers' cat. This is Jupiter (front cat) and Tinsel!

For fans of

ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs, The Great British Sewing Bee, From Carly B, withwendy

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Try Dressmaker yourself!

Dressmaker doesn't have a demo up on Steam, but you can play the original prototype on itch.io. The core of the game is there, but things have naturally changed and improved as development has progressed. The demo absolutely captures the loop and experience of the full game though, don't worry!

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From the developers...

I caught up with Dressmaker co-creators Jonathan Hau-Yoon and Sabrina Becker to find out where the idea for the game came from, Sabrina's love of fashion, and how to translate the act of sewing into a video game.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

LFG: Where did the idea for Dressmaker come from?

Jonathan Hau-Yoon: Before Dressmaker, I was working on Terra Nil and I found it super satisfying to make a game that wasn't just about entertaining people, that it had a little bit of something else going on. I really liked how working on Terra Nil eased a bunch of my climate anxiety and after I stopped work on Terra Nil, I was really looking for something that would do a similar sort of thing. I was interested in making a cozy game, except I haven't really been super fond of a bunch of cozy games in that, once I look under the cozy aesthetics into the skeleton underneath, it just feels like it isn't really all that cozy there.

A farming game sounds great, but it ends up being about making a whole bunch of money instead of taking care of the environment or having a beautiful garden. And so I was looking around trying to find things that I could do that were in that direction. Sabrina was a really, really big source of inspiration. We've been dating for over seven years, and during our time together, whenever we watch movies she points out all the costume changes and whether the clothing is historically accurate and when it isn't. We'll watch really bad movies because the costumes were good [laughs]. I started to learn more and more about making clothing and how bad fast fashion is, how bad polyester is and how great natural fibers are.

Also seeing a bunch of the YouTubers and various content creators that make things about making clothing, it opened my eyes to what a massive, massive audience there seems to be for making clothes in general. Then Sabrina was also playing some mobile games about making clothes...

Sabrina Becker: They were just dress up games.

Jonathan: You're right. They were clothes-related but they were very shallow. It was just like, wow, there surely should be a way that we can make something that has more depth, that is more closely tied to the real craft of of making clothes. Sabrina told me that making dresses is the obvious first step. Making a skirt is like one of the easiest things you could possibly make, so we would start there and just see what happens.

LFG: Sabrina, where did your love for sewing and historical fashion come from?

Sabrina: I grew up with my mom who would sew. She would make me all of my Halloween costumes and all of my school play costumes and just general dress up stuff. My favorite thing ever was going to the fabric store with her and there's aisles and aisles of potential. There's so much excitement and creativity. She would "help" me sew things, and by that I mean she would sew and give me sort of busy work to do [laughs], but I felt very involved!

I've always had a love for clothing and the craft of sewing. My dad also brought me up with a big interest in history and understanding the world and how things came to be. I think it was a really natural mesh of both of those upbringings.

LFG: Do you make clothing now?

Sabrina: I do! I had to take a break from it for a while because of the health condition that I have, it can sometimes make sewing really difficult. It is a surprisingly physically intensive task.

I've had Jonathan help me cut out fabric on the floor and then he spasmed his back but that is also some of where Dressmaker came from, I think. It was this way for me to explore that interest and that passion in a way that was more physically accessible.

LFG: Where do you start with translating the act of sewing, dressmaking, and pattern drafting to a video game?

Sabrina: The thing we started with was cutting out the pattern pieces on the fabric because that is actually like a very gamified puzzle-esque thing. You're trying to fit all of these things in a limited space and you want to use as little fabric as possible to save money or because you don't have enough.

Then there are these curve balls where this piece actually needs to be cut on the bias diagonally and then suddenly nothing fits or you're trying to pattern match and then you actually need to spread your pieces out really far. The decisions that are made in terms of creativity and quality and finance is a really interesting puzzle to solve in itself. Then everything just sort of spiderwebbed out from there.

Jonathan: I I think it's pretty easy when you're making a game that is based on a real world thing, because then it just gives you all of the ideas and then it's really about curating which ones you want to use or not. What we did know that is that we wanted to make it primarily a creative tool. It wasn't supposed to be as realistic as possible, because if it was then you would be on the floor cutting out fabric for hours and hours and hours.

Sabrina: Ironing for weeks.

LFG: Yeah, I was surprised at the lack of ironing!

Sabrina: We have had people request ironing! I think it was always about the creative process of making the dress. So the pattern cutting was really important because what you cut out is what appears on the dress in the game. If you have a panel and you line it up so that the bunny rabbit is in the exact center, that's what you'll have on your dress.

But something like ironing, while it is so important to the creative process of dress making, isn't a a creative act.

Jonathan: We still kept sewing though.

Sabrina: We did. You can't have a dress making game without sewing [laughs].

LFG: I've been really enjoying the characters who are coming into the shop and asking for dresses, what was the process like for creating them, and which time periods for fashion were you picking from?

Sabrina: Our first character was Rose the librarian, who is a very kind of like 1940s dark academia-coded sort. Then for the prototype that was put on itch, we were like,"Oh, she needs like a rival." A counterpart, kind of a contrasting character. So then we came up with Prudence, who is this very like over-the-top Victorian socialite woman. Very snooty, but we love her.

From there it just sort of expanded. I approached things very much from like an aesthetic-first thought process. What dresses would you make for these hypothetical people? I wanted to get as much as we could out of the game to have overlap between different garment pieces and different fabrics that you could use in different ways because everything is modular and about combining things.

I built from the aesthetic side and then when we brought our writer Kerstin on, she really helped flesh out those aesthetics and vibes and turn them into more real feeling people which was a really wonderful process.

LFG: What has the journey of Dressmaker been like for you both?

Jonathan: I've been in games for some 16 years and I have never had a game that I work on go quite as smoothly as this one. I think such a big part of it is having a strong enough foundation to build on that you're not spending so much of your time trying to figure out what the game is and trying to grasp for other bits to try and make it better. If you're lucky enough to have a really strong foundation, you don't feel like you have to build in extra features. Also because it's something that resonates with people a lot, it feels as if we've just been able to look at comments from people who play the game and just see all of the things that they ask for, or the things that they think aren't great. But even when there are criticisms, it's like they're doing this because they really care.

There might be some something to do with very aggressively saying no to expanding scope which has I think helped. But also, it's your first game.

Sabrina: It is. So I have nothing to compare it to really. Everyone tells me like,"Wow, this is going so smoothly and it's so unstressful." We're also so lucky, I think we have a really incredible online community already of people who are so passionate about the game. Our Discord is like, thousands of messages a day, I think. I'm not over exaggerating.

It's just constant with people making dresses and talking about each other's dresses and being so excited and supportive. It's such a brilliantly warm creative space. That has been so inspiring and every time we get down in the weeds and we're overwhelmed or stressed out, you can just look and then you're like, wow.

LFG: Who do you hope the game reaches? Do you hope that it inspires people to take up sewing and dressmaking in real life?

Sabrina: I think our sort of primary audience, the idea that I've had in mind is sort of like the people who were really into the sort of like girly flash games and the Barbie dress up games or paper dolls or there were those like booklets where you had the mannequin and you would design your dress, or people who made dresses for their Barbies. I think there is this sort of creative outlet in designing clothing and costumes that we don't really get to express as much as adults as we once did when we were younger and it's just sort of like, bring that back! And if it does inspire people to sew in real life, that would be incredible. I think there is so much joy and love that comes from the craft of making your own clothes, specifically when you make them to fit your own body. Everyone is so different and standardized sizing is complete bullshit.

LFG: Yep!

Sabrina: There's something so empowering about having control of how your clothing actually fits you.

Jonathan: We do also have a lot of people in our Discord who talk about real world sewing, so we've tried to make it sort of a general creative clothing space that isn't just about the game. It's just more about the craft itself.

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Some good news to end the week

It's not exactly been a great week in gaming news, but here are a couple of things that made me smile:

• CAPCOM's generational run continues: Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil seems to be a really great movie! I'm going to see it tonight and I absolutely can't wait
• New cat discovered! Yes, I know this isn't gaming-related, but hey, this is my newsletter, back off!!
• Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes cheekily recreated their infamous "How to share PS4 discs" meme, only this time, there are no physical games to do it with...

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Thanks so much for reading! Have a great weekend whatever you're doing, and I'll see you next week!