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When Jonathan Hau-Yoon wanted to make something as meaningful as the environmental strategy game Terra Nil, he turned for inspiration to his longtime partner. Sabrina Becker had worn a dress she made herself to their very first date, and would have studied costume design abroad had hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a connective tissue disorder I also have) not put those plans on hold.
The pair developed a concept around the creative decisions involved in dressmaking, like trying to fit pattern pieces on to available fabric while observing the grain line (the direction of the thread in woven fabric). Other decisions followed: a 3D model on which to place garment pieces, buttons and trims with which to decorate them, clients with commissions as creative prompts.
Hau-Yoon knew this ambitious project would benefit from the support of his employers at Free Lives. A bare-bones concept video got hundreds of thousands of views, and a prototype built with colleagues in three weeks had about 30,000 downloads, but he worried it wouldn’t be enough, that he might even have to leave a job he loved to pursue the game full-time. What convinced founder Evan Greenwood in the end was the passion of the player base. Many signed up for itch.io accounts just to play the prototype, and left paragraphs-long comments about how much it meant to them.
And they had requests. “A surprising amount of people asked for ironing,” Becker laughs. Others wanted to be able to print out the patterns and use them in real life, Barbie Fashion Designer style, which isn’t possible here. “We don’t actually run a cloth simulation,” Hau-Yoon explains. Becker adds: “But you can get incredibly creative in a way that you couldn’t in real life. A lot of our players make whole paintings on the dresses, using the trims and buttons and things; they’re drawing Starry Night and the Sistine Chapel.”
When I sew, I draft my own patterns to better fit my particular shape, so I wanted to know if Dressmaker includes this aspect. “We have a whole measurement system,” Becker says. “It is simplified, but it was really important to us to illustrate that if you’re coming in for a bespoke dress the dress should be made to fit you. So there’s this whole lattice deformer thing that allows our dress pieces to shift and scale proportionally.”
Hau-Yoon says that programmer Ruan Rothmann calls Dressmaker “the most technically challenging game that he’s worked on”: “It really matters where seams are and that certain vertices align.” Other sewists can imagine what aspects have proved challenging: how the fabric stretches across a body, pattern distortion, creating gathers.
Becker’s experience has been invaluable, and similarly her understanding of historical costume. Dressmaker isn’t era-specific, so as not to limit players, but it does have what she calls “a vintage feel”, looking as if it’s from “The sort of era where you would have actually gone to a dressmaker to have a dress made”. And when it came to the question of whether to branch off the story (from novelist Kerstin Hall), she knew that sewists would resent missing out: “I want to be able to make ALL of the dresses. If it’s branching and because of decisions you made you don’t get to make a wedding dress for a specific character, I would feel so gutted about that.”
So what has she learned about the process of making games? “It’s all numbers and spreadsheets! At least the past two months of the work that I’ve been doing.” “It’s very difficult to capture how to score something when it’s just a vibe,” Hau-Yoon admits. “How elegant is elegant? What number describes elegance?”
They hope players will appreciate their efforts, which include a whole-team sewing class arranged by Becker. “It was surprisingly Zen,” says Hau-Yoon. “Initially I was very slow and nervous, but that whirring of a sewing machine … it fades away into the background.” Players will soon be able to hear that whirr for themselves, as sound designer Jason Sutherland has painstakingly recorded Becker’s own weighty vintage Singer sewing machine, along with other related tools. “I’m obsessed with the scissors noise,” Becker smiles. “It’s so satisfying.”
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Dressmaker is coming to PC on 21 September
