Tailor Town

About the Game

Somebody needs a suit for a wedding. Somebody else needs one for a funeral. Every one of them walks through your door with an occasion, a style and a budget. Only you know what is actually correct.

TailorTown is a shop sim about bespoke tailoring, from the bolt of cloth to the handover. You walk the floor, you carry one thing at a time, and everything that leaves the shop was cut and stitched by your own hand.

Reopen grandpa's shop

Barnaby "Pops" Thimble kept a tailor's shop in this town for forty years. It has been shut since he retired to the coast. You can't sew a straight seam, so you start on the Row, in Mr. Hemming's shop, and learn the trade at his bench.

Then you unlock grandpa's door. Dust sheets over everything. A ceiling that drips. Four rooms you can't get into yet.

Sweep the front room yourself and take whoever the town sends you. Ring the builders for the roof and the walls. Every room you open puts another station back to work, and nearly every job turns up something of his: his old shears, a tin of photographs, the order ledger, measurements pencilled on the wall behind the paper. They go on the shelf in the front room. Pops writes from the coast when he hears how you're getting on.

Take the brief

A client states the occasion, the look they're after and what they can spend. Take the fitting, book them for a later day, or politely decline. A full bench is a good reason to say no. At the mirror you design the suit part by part: jacket, shirt, trousers, each with its own cloth, colour, pattern and cut.

Then ask them. Some keep a dislike to themselves until they see it on. "Black? Nobody's died." Agree the price, and the order goes on the board with a deadline. Regulars come back, and they remember what you made them.

Know your cloth

Worsted wool, flannel, tweed, mohair, linen, poplin. Pinstripe, herringbone, houndstooth, windowpane, glen check. Weight, super number and price per metre all matter, and every bolt is a finite number of metres. Cut carelessly and the last half-metre of a good cloth is gone. Ring the suppliers from the shop phone; the better houses open their books to you as your name grows.

Cut it, stitch it, finish it

Take the bolt from the shelf to the cutting table and steer the shears along the chalk. They glide down the straights. The curves are yours. Drift into the piece and you nick it; three slips and it's ruined. Then work the pedal and guide the seam through the machine: pull the pins, ease off at the corners, backstitch both ends. Press the wrinkles out; linger and you scorch it. Hang it on the rack. The jacket, shirt and trousers of one order find each other there and come together into the finished suit.

Every slip at the bench comes off the price.

Dress for the occasion

Black for a funeral. Nothing that upstages the couple. A board meeting is not a party. The Tailor's Handbook holds the real rules, written the way a tailor would tell you: which colours and which patterns each occasion will take, named outright. Read it, and you'll know what to put in front of a client before they ask.

Make your name

The Tailor's Gazette lands each morning with the fashion of the day and the town's coming events. A wedding in five days, business in nine. The tailor who reads the paper is the one with the right cloth already on the shelf. Dress someone beautifully for the big day and it's your name in the next morning's edition; fall short and the story goes to Pinch & Pleat down the road. Deliver well and the better cloth houses start taking your calls. Miss a deadline and they stop.

Build up the workshop

Everything you earn can go back into the shop, ordered from the phone as your name opens the catalogue. Two dozen upgrades, each one felt at the bench: pattern weights that hold the cloth still, pinking shears that forgive a wide cut, a rotary cutter that rolls the straights for you; a speed dial, a walking foot, clips instead of pins, a button that backstitches for you. A pressing iron, a bicycle courier for the cloth, a coffee machine to steady your hands. Later, an espresso machine you grind, tamp and pull yourself. And Percy the apprentice, who takes a whole part of an order to his own bench in grandpa's old workshop and gets better with every job.

Make the shop yours

Sage panelling and fern damask, oxblood and parquet, cream and walnut, a navy atelier, plum damask: eleven schemes in all. Wallpaper, wainscot, floor, rugs and curtains are each yours to choose. Mix your own or buy a matched set. You preview it live from above the shop, and it is fitted in a cloud of dust and hammering. A handsome shop does a little for your name.

Keep the shop

Open in the morning, lock up at night, and keep the bench moving in between: appointments to honour, rush jobs, and the ones who want something you'd rather not make. Everything saves.

Features

• A full craft chain you perform yourself: take the brief → design the suit at the mirror → order the cloth → cut the panels → sew the seams → hang the parts together on the rack → hand it over.

• Your grandfather's shut-up shop to bring back: clean it by hand, get the builders in, open it room by room, and find what he left behind.

• Real tailoring materials (8 fabrics, 14 patterns, dozens of colours) rendered as woven cloth on the garment and on the client.

• Occasion-and-style dress codes that judge every part of the suit, not only the jacket.

• Clients of eight different sorts, men and women, with their own dislikes and long memories.

• Two hand-feel bench games, steering shears and a pedal-and-aim sewing machine, whose results carry through to what the client pays.

• 24 workshop upgrades that change how the benches play, plus little bench games of their own for pressing a piece and making the morning coffee.

• A courier, an espresso machine and an apprentice of your own to grow into.

• Town events with a best-dressed write-up in the paper. Yours, or your rival's.

• A reputation that opens premium textile houses and the better end of the catalogue.

• A shop you redecorate surface by surface: wallpapers, panelling, floors, rugs, curtains.

• Days you open and close, appointments, regulars and deadlines you can miss.

• Top-down, walk-the-floor shop in a hand-built town. Keyboard or controller.