Engadget
"Make the dresses you've always dreamed of."
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, 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 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 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.
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.
The video itself got some 600,000-plus views across TikTok and Instagram, and was filled with comments of people asking what the name of the game was and where they could play it.
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