Engadget Indie Pitch: Dressmaker

There are so many rad and important games coming out from smaller studios all the time, and the Engadget Indie Pitch is here to highlight some that you simply must see.

We've been around long enough to remember the days when Steam was curated by hand, with 20 or so titles added to the storefront in any given month. Today, roughly 2,000 games go live every month on Steam, and that's not counting all of the console, mobile and VR titles we have to consider. A vast majority of these games come from smaller teams, solo creators, artist collectives and independent studios who don't have immediate access to shiny showcases or marketing teams — which brings us to the Indie Pitch. We can't cover every excellent new game here, but we can offer a curated slice of indie pie every now and then.

The Engadget Indie Pitch features a Q&A with the developer of an in-production or recently released game that's caught our eye. Today, it's a chat with the Cozy Lives crew, makers of the hotly anticipated sewing and designing sim, Dressmaker , which debuts on Steam today.

Cozy Lives is a small new team that exists inside of Free Lives , the acclaimed indie studio behind GORN , Genital Jousting , Broforce , Terra Nil and other hits, and based out of Cape Town, South Africa. Dressmaker is the brainchild of Terra Nil co-creator Jonathan Hau-Yoon and dressmaking expert Sabrina Becker, who turned to games after a chronic illness, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, forced her to pivot away from professional costume design. The following interview answers were provided by Jonathan, Sabrina and Free Lives producer Anja "Nanna" Venter Rausch.

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.

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.

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.

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.