Dearest Dressmakers,

I cannot express the great relief I feel, but I shall try.

As a game developer, I think it’s dangerous to love your game. Believing too strongly in something you’re working on can make you blind to its faults, overly optimistic about its audience and performance, and cause you to spend years of your life on something that cannot sustain you. This has been the downfall of many indie developers: we typically only hear of the ones who have become successful, while countless other games fall into obscurity.

But I couldn’t help but love this one. I had always just thought of clothes as fabric to be bought in a store and that didn’t fit quite right. Sabrina taught me that clothes are so much more than that: that clothes tell us about economic activity, technology, culture, social status, politics, stories. That they are incredible feats of engineering and construction, full of creativity, when you get into the craft. The way her eyes would light up was infectious, and I wanted to make something that expressed that joyful creativity she was talking about. And where the goal wasn’t to make as much money as possible, but to make the most beautiful dresses. Where it wasn’t to scale the business and create a fashion empire, but to quietly make bespoke clothing for individual women. And where we would have a large cast of women of different shapes and sizes, different ages and personalities and a sense of community. I was already in love with the idea, and it scared me: I was now susceptible to all of the dangerous, blind optimism of a person in love.

So imagine my relief when within 24 hours of the game’s launch, we have hundreds of players leaving reviews saying it is also their dream game. Our discord server is overrun with new players posting their dresses (and asking for tech support). I’ve watched streamer after streamer and Youtuber play the game, and seen countless mentions across social media. It turns out my optimism was right and I’m not (that) crazy!!!

And we have fully recouped our costs, which allows us to continue working on this project that I love with the knowledge that other people love it too!

I am so grateful to a large number of people, including:

• the Dressmaker Team, and the other badass folks at Free Lives

• MadMorph and CuteGamesClub, who made viral videos about the game in its nascence, and ultimately contributed to the game getting enough traction to be greenlit

• our mods and playtesters who have been helping us weather the tsunami of Discord activity

• everyone who has shared their dresses or taken the time to write kind words about the game

This was far too sincere, and your usual tea will resume next time,

Jonathan

Dearest Dressmakers,

The big day is here, and I hope you all celebrate with wonderful dresses while I hyperventilate in the bathroom.

We’ve made a game so devoid of violence, so flagrantly feminine and so painfully sincere that we were swiftly barred from Free Lives’s social media, lest we tarnish their name and cause them to lose their founding membership to the South African Chapter for More Blood in Video Games.

In the immediate weeks we’ll be releasing small updates to fix any bugs found since release, with a sprinkling of new fabrics and accessories on top to look forward to.

We’ve also begun work on some other exciting content for a chunkier update(s) a little further down the line:

• An online challenge mode, where you can compare your dress designs with other dressmakers and vote for your favourites.

• Transparent fabrics that weren’t included in the launch version of the game. Layered transparency with double-sided meshes requires some extra work to get looking right.

• The game runs fast on the Steam Deck, but we want to give it proper controller support.

• We’re also planning mobile and Switch ports, which have been requested constantly on our various social media channels.

Thank you for all of your support, all the way from the first prototype. The game wouldn’t have gotten greenlit without your loud and vocal encouragement. We can’t wait to see what you make!

The Dressmaker Team