What'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. Sabrina has been the vision holder. External contractors have included Kerstin Hall, our writer, and Meydän, our composer.

How long have you been working on it? Jonathan: We began the first playable prototype in July 2025, uploading it to itch.io. After a month or so of deliberation, it was greenlit by Free Lives in September 2025.

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'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. 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. So during my vacation after shipping the arid update to Terra Nil, I made a very basic prototype of Dressmaker. I added a 3D mannequin that you could drag the pieces onto to see your dress as a 3D model. And then a friend encouraged me to make a TikTok video about just that. The video itself got some 600,000-plus views across TikTok and Instagram. So I took it to Free Lives, and together with Ruan and Sara, we spent three weeks making a more fleshed-out prototype that was actually a playable game and put that on itch.io. The game got around 30,000 downloads in its first month.