October Patch Notes - Build 443

Dearest Dressmakers,

The gossip vine has been abuzz with news of the game. Among these is the claim that Sabrina and Jonathan are married! This is news to us. Last I checked, their ring fingers were distinctly bare, and nuptials distinctly lacking, much to Sabrina’s grandmother’s dismay. It would seem that as juicy as it is, even in the world of gossip there is a lesson here about primary and secondary sources.

We’ve taken such joy in seeing your dresses shared, as images, as videos, as comments of videos, memes and fan art, and the variety and creativity. We’ve also been watching streams, enjoying your voice acting and seeing your reactions to the game’s story, as well as feeling palpable game-designer-pain, which is a great segue into…

UX Improvements

We realise that the UX of the game, especially surrounding placing accessories and trim, is a source of great frustration. I’m sorry! I’ve subjected the programmer (also me) to an extensive Clockwork Orange-like twitch viewing session and hopefully, now that we have far more information on the new player experience, we have a much better idea of pain points and frustrations, and opportunities for improvement. We also understand that the one thing worse than bad UX, is bad UX that you’ve gotten used to that then gets changed. So, we are sorry for making some changes to keys and workflows you might have gotten used to, but I think everyone should be able to agree it was necessary!

Adding options for rebinding all the controls, and gamepad and other controls (e.g. Steamdeck) is a high priority for us and something we hope to get to soon. However, it makes the most sense to nail the UX first so that we aren’t designing controls around poor interactions.

We are aware that placing trim around the cuffs of sleeves can be especially frustrating.  It’s also one of the most obvious places to put trim (and the most technically challenging), and we are actively working on ways to make that particular interaction less frustrating.

This update also contains one or two very minor breaking changes. Making a change that retroactively affects your game is not a decision that we take lightly, and we truly agonise over any change that could affect existing dresses, no matter how small. However, we believe that this is a game that we’d like to support for years to come, and with this long-term view in mind, these changes make sense if we believe that they are for the greater good.  I think 99% of players won’t notice a difference for 99% of existing dresses, so sorry if you are a part of that particular 1%. If an old dress of yours is particularly broken, please let us know as we’d like to look into fixing it.  You might notice certain pieces of trim just sitting or folding ever-so-slightly differently. In general, trim should be smoother, easier to place, and less glitchy, but this comes at the cost that old dresses that have trim can be slightly off. Again - I really hate the thought that I might have ruined the painstaking work you’ve done on your dresses, and I’ve been extremely careful to try and make these improvements while affecting existing dresses as little as possible.

That said, this patch is mostly aimed at improving the tutorial, controls, and UX.  We’ve also added some extra accessibility options.

• Selecting an accessory in the mannequin scene now hides the pins for all other accessory items

• Minor change to sewing scene animation for UX

• Improved trim placement, especially around edges

• "Fast Trim Placement" option - partially to place quicker, but also accessibility to be able to place trim with far less clicking

• You can now drag to rotate mannequin while placing trim

• Trim can now be lowered to negative heights. I don’t know why you would do that, but you could!

• Improve trim selection logic - you can select trim by clicking on an end node, extend by clicking it again, and selection persists after placement.

• Added a button to duplicate trim (this allows you to place a new trim piece with the same height/size/tilt than the current one)

• Improved normal detection for simple accessory items (they should not snap their rotation as much)

• Improved UX for moving simple accessory items (drag offset is properly applied, meaning the item no longer snaps when you just want to move it a tiny little bit).

• Option to disable the red outline

• "Less Animation" option (disables scrolling textures and zoom in sewing scene and cutting room)

• WIP improvements to camera controls in mannequin scene: Zoom is now smooth rather than stepped.You can zoom in/out by holding control while scrolling mousewheel. Hold right click and drag mouse to pan view. Added keyboard controls for orbiting. Apologies for changing this but this was definitely necessary! We are still not happy with the controls here and will be making more improvements in the future.  We are considering a more drastic rework of camera controls, so please bear with us in the meantime.

• "Accessory rotation gizmo" now has buttons for moving the accessory as well, useful for micro adjustments

• Holding Control shifts the accessory rotation gizmo’s rotation frame to the accessory’s, rather than the mannequin’s. Hard to explain, try it and see!

• added a randomise button to the sketchbook that randomises dress components

• Added a button to delete off-rack dresses from the sketchbook.

• bloom option

• Fix to ‘flashbang’ glitch in cutting room

• The scissors can now only discard fabric when the 'discard fabric' button was clicked. Sorry to that person who lost 5m of velvet from that misclick. Sorry to everyone else for changing this.

• Added a button to grab all panel pieces from the cutting room

• added some tooltips to cutting room buttons

• Moved some buttons in the cutting room scene for clarity and improved layout

• Clicking back after navigating to the sketchbook from the sidebar now returns to the last scene rather than front desk

• Fix fudging for color and fabric type requirements: Before, colour and fabric type was calculated as a raw % of area of each panel relative to the total area of fabric used in the dress. Now, panels on small components (e.g. the collar or sleeves) are given a boost, so that those also make a meaningful difference. This seems to conform much closer to most players’ intuitive expectations, but unfortunately means that your past dresses’ scores might now show slightly differently. Tags were already calculated in this way.

• Fix certain trims having a default tilt offset, meaning that they clip if not adjusted. This is especially apparent with e.g. the ivory looping lace. Unfortunately this means that for existing dresses, if you had adjusted tilt on some trim, those might now be ever-so-slightly off. Again, really sorry for this.

• You can now drag pan in the cutting room, or pan using mousewheel while scissors are selected

• Several tutorial improvements, aimed at things that people are commonly misunderstanding (Did you know you can page the sketchbook to see your other open commissions, or click on component names to see a selection of available items?)

• Added lots of control hints to the bottom of the screen, especially for commonly misunderstood or unknown features. 

• Reduction to camera flash brightness in photo scene

• Fix being able to leave cutting scene during scissor animation, which can leave the scissors in a broken state

• Fix some clipping and other issues on various dress components

• Some performance improvements that seem to help crashes or stutters on certain system configurations. We are aware that some people are still experiencing crashes and/or performance issues, we are trying our best to find the cause. For many, uninstalling “OMEN gaming hub” has solved the issue.

• Relabeled “Sell” button in photo scene to “Sell as off-rack” to help clear confusion

• Improved visibility of panel preview hint from inventory

• Fix animation bug in measuring scene at low framerates

• Mannequin gears can be adjusted with mousewheel or arrow keys in the sizing room

• Using the last bit of an accessory or trim now removes the entry from the inventory.

• Trim items with typed beads (e.g. tassel trim) now also show when filtering for that item

• Gifting unlock moved a bit later, to help clear some confusion

• Fixed trim breaking when placed on certain bits of more complex geometry e.g. sleeve cuffs, bows, stays etc

This update also contains some new content. This content is unlocked as usual throughout the campaign - if you’ve already progressed past where you would have unlocked it, it will be unlocked retroactively for you!

New content

• New chrysanthemum skirt, less poofy variant

• Longer pencil skirt variant

• New cotton design type and fabrics: Autumnal Vine Border Print Cotton, Spring Vine Border Print Cotton & a simple Taupe Cotton

• New lace fabrics: Silver Lace and Pastel Pink Lace

• New shot silks and gradient silks: Burning Forest, Golden Dawn, Lavender Field & Snowflake Gradient Silks

• More Silver Accessories and Trims: Silver Clasp, Silver Narcissus Chain and Silver Twin Souls Chain (Don’t worry - the silver we source doesn’t bother vampires!)

• Some spooky Black Dagger Beaded Trim and Widow’s Lace Trim

From making do to mending,

Team Dressmaker