When I first moved to NYC I supported myself primarily designing custom dressup games for the web. There was no Jesus Dressup magnet income yet (I couldn’t find anyone to produce them for a couple years after I arrived). But the online version of it was very, VERY popular. I mean hell, it was in the top two results for the word “jesus” for a decade. That was enough to wrangle in similar jobs from a wide variety of clients.
My dressup games have been birthday presents for husbands & wives, promotional tools for marketers, lawyers, burlesque dancers, porn stars & other adult services needing erotic dressups. I was even hired to do a dressup game for a couple of Australian escorts looking to boost their business!
These types were always favorites of mine. They requested I make them have a growl face when the client touches parts that’re off-limits, and wink to show where to go. I always gave discounts and extra attention to these, and I’m happy to say they were a substantial portion of this business, but my clients spanned the gamut – lawyers & librarians to bohemians & bodybuilders. I was also fine with doing kid-friendly dressups as well. Heavy.com had me making a monthly celebrity dressup which was a nice consistent check for a while. I even did one for Blue Man Group.
It was a wonderful, dependable income for a budding freelancer such as myself. I’d found a niche. In fact, for a time it seemed I’d cornered the market on custom dressup games production for the web. Ahhh, those were the days.
I do not write code. I draw and design to no end, but when it comes to programming I am inept. I can’t make my brain do it to any great extent, and that’s turned out to be one of my biggest business handicaps. Luckily there was Dreamweaver at the time to do all that work for me. It was the perfect tool for building quality, movable layer dress up games that’d work on almost all computers, browsers and the like.
Then came smartphones, tablets, apps, updated browsers, and a whole new more complicated web. And Dreamweaver did not try to keep up with the movable layers technology. For a while I could keep up with Dreamweaver’s lag. I hired programmers to give me fix files to implement after a page is designed & I made a HELP! page too, but Google Chrome seemed to almost plot against any future for movable layers.
I was just recently reminded of all this working on a magnetic dressup Thomas Morton game for the Viceland show BALLS DEEP. Designing and producing beautiful dress up games is something I love to do. I used to do one after another for myself, with no intentions of anything more than fun for me, i.e. (Yolandi, Unholy Army, Mr. X & Revenge).
What makes this all even more frustrating is I know it’s possible to make workable dressup games for today’s web. Universal, smooth moving layers on any browser, and any device, is a reality. I’ve found working, detailed instructions & examples that simply need to be programmed in by someone way, way smarter than I. And I have dressup jobs ready to be made if I could just figure this out.
If you think you have these skills to make this possible for me again, please contact me. These are my most favorite jobs, and I would love to start regularly making them again.
For a thorough list of dressup games I’ve made over the years you can visit my portfolio here. For the record, Safari is the most reliable browser to use if you want these to work properly.
