I Quit My Job to Make a Dress-Up Web Game, and It Blew Up
The Story of Vortella’s Dress Up (Part 1)
Hey, Kelsey at Devortel here 🙋♀️. Taking the metaphorical microphone from my partner Wes at Devortel to continue our blog posts about our web game development story (see Vortelli’s Pizza and Vortelli’s Pizza Delivery). Quite a bit has happened since our last update in 2023 — most notably, Vortella’s Dress Up smashed any and all expectations of performance on Poki.
As of May 2025, some Vortella’s stats:
- 16 million gameplays per month
- 460k daily active users
- 12m 40s average session time (this is impressive if you’re familiar with web games, I promise)
- Largest tile on Poki USA homepage for 7 weeks
- Hit a concurrent player high of 12.5K
Like most overnight successes, the Vortella’s story actually started several years ago and faced a lot of low points, pivots, and doubts along the way.
Coming up:
- How I quit my UX design job and switched to making web games
- How a terrible fashion person (me) ended up making a dress-up game
- Why I chose web and Poki
- The glow up of Vortella’s Dress Up feat. Poki Playtesting
Vortella Begins
Flashback to March 2023 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC): Wes and I went to GDC and met a bunch of the Poki team in person for the first time. During our chat, the topic of future games came up and Joep, Poki’s Head of Developer Relations, mentioned they were looking for more dress up games on Poki. Unsaid but understood: a lot of game devs are dudes who feel weird about making dress up games for little girls, and I (a woman) might be more interested.
All the dress up games I could find on the web featured a hefty dose of artistry, essentially a digital doll with different clothing items, and drawing and digital painting is not my strength. I’d always wanted to make 3D games, and I’d been working in Blender to make models for the Vortelli’s universe. So I initially dismissed Joep’s suggestion and thought “Eh, not for me.”
A few days later, I attended a GDC panel with Roblox developers, including one who had worked on a successful fashion game. At that moment something clicked in my brain and went “Ohh, what about a 3D fashion game for the web?”
Vort[ina]’s 1.0
I decided to build my game with the PlayCanvas engine because a) PlayCanvas uses JavaScript, and I knew some JavaScript and b) that’s what Wes used. I was starting with zero game coding knowledge — up until this point I’d done some front-end website coding here and there. I was determined to prove I had the skills to make a game on my own so I did all the coding, modeling, and animation.
I initially called the game “Vortina’s Boutique”, but changed it for SEO reasons and because no one can spell “boutique” but the French. My idea was to do two things differently than the existing dress up games on Poki: make the character 3D, and add NPCs with likes and dislikes so the game could have rounds with a success/fail game loop. Vortina was a character who would talk to the player and give rewards for completing the scenario.
Progress was slow. I was working a rolling contract as the UX lead at a digital agency in Chicago, and I was burned out mentally and creatively from seven years of nonsensical client requests and ruthless deadlines. The game was a fun side project, but my goal was to find a new full-time role as a UX designer or researcher, with game dev as my side hustle. I was blasting out resumes, but I’d started applying right as the post-pandemic tech layoffs were ramping up. It was rejection after rejection, and my self-esteem reached an all time low.
Things Get Serious
In March 2024, two things changed:
- Poki released their Playtesting feature, giving developers access to screen recordings of actual users playing the game.
- My agency laid off the rest of the UX team, intending for me to take on the work of three people. This was the final straw for the agency job and I announced I would not be renewing my contract with them.
I was still hesitant to switch to game development full time, so I made a deal with myself: if I reached 100 job applications with no offer, then I would “hire myself” and go all-in on Vortella’s. Spoiler alert: I hired myself.
Poki’s Playtesting feature was a (literal and metaphorical) game-changer. It gave us free access to the actual player base and near-instant qualitative feedback. Inspired by Cem’s (OnRush Studios) playtesting article, Wes built a system to collect quantitative data from game events, which became a milestone in our development process. We now could test features and gauge player reactions in quick iterative cycles, and we really started to learn about what resonated with our users on a new level. With this data and unrestricted brain power on tap, this is when Vortella’s started to take shape. Wes was also working on a new game, Vortelli’s Cafe, using the same testing process.
Because the number of players that reach gameplay start varies a lot by time, day of the week, phase of the moon, etc, I tried to normalize the data by only comparing the users that interacted with the game. Within each build, I tracked key metrics like:
- Percent that played over 4 minutes
- Percent that watched 1 or more rewarded ads
- Percent that clicked 1/10/20/40/100 fashion items
- Average and median session durations
- A funnel progression, with percentage of players that finished the tutorial and total rounds they played
A couple of notable findings:
- I was pretty shocked to see that half of the users dropped when introduced to a text box modal — even when the intention was to give them a present. (I had translations for ~8 languages.) Lessons learned: use as little text as possible and don’t use full-screen takeovers. Wes found very similar results when testing Vortelli’s Cafe.
- Many players didn’t seem to be understanding the concept of dressing other people — they wanted the character to be a self-reflection. I debated whether to have scenarios or just a sandbox, and even tested some versions with both options. Every time I did a test, the simpler version that allowed more freedom ended up with longer sessions. So no more scenarios.
This brought up a new problem: while it seemed that most players were understanding the UI and mechanics, many were losing interest quite quickly.
At the same time I was running these tests on Vortella’s, Wes was overhauling the entire game loop in Vortelli’s Cafe. Our thought for VC had been to try out a cafe management mechanic where you control the environment instead of a character, which is very popular in mobile games.
While playtesting Vortelli’s Cafe, engagement was way below where we needed it to be. We iterated through ideas and designs for months, but nothing was grabbing players’ attention.
Around this time, My Perfect Hotel (by SayGames) launched on Poki and quickly took a top spot on the homepage. Its game loop revolves around hotel management, but the player controls a character. That, plus the success of Monkey Mart (by TinyDobbins) and our previous Vortelli’s games were all pointing to something: players wanted to control a character that runs around in a little world.
Wes started to overhaul Cafe to allow a player-controlled character, and I had a strong feeling that it was the way to go for Vortella’s as well. I forked my existing PlayCanvas project and set about rebuilding Vortella to move around a 3D world.
Vortella’s 2.0: Vortella’s First Steps
Movement and camera in a 3D world was something Wes and I discussed a lot. There had been a lot of players that really struggled with the movement system in Vortelli’s Pizza where the mouse controls the camera and keyboard controls player movement. While these controls are common with console games, we’d gotten feedback from the Poki audience and our own friends and family that casual players found it difficult to maneuver their character. Trying to build on those learnings, we figured an automatic camera was simplest.
The swap to a player-controlled character in a 3D world worked — my first test that used a room with “stations” more than doubled my median engagement time from ~2 minutes to 4–5 minutes. Vortelli’s Cafe had a very similar result. Hence our unofficial studio mantra: players just want to run around in a little world.
I kept testing and refining the movement system, room layout, and performance until I was happy with the metrics. For players that interacted with the game:
- 97% clicked at least one fashion item, indicating they could use the movement controls on both mobile and desktop, understood the game, and the UI was clear
- 25% of users clicked over 100 items
- ~51% were staying longer than 4 minutes
Even though the game was, in my opinion, somewhat unfinished, I really wanted to launch it before the end of the year (and start earning some money 🙃).
After a successful Web Fit Test, Vortella’s launched in December 2024 and hit 5 million gameplays in its first month, averaging a 6m 28s session time. Times were good.
Wes Joins Team Vortella
The week after launch, Wes and I got a request to meet with Romy (bizdev) and Nimo (analytics) from the Poki team, who asked if we could make Vortella’s a multiplayer game with a competition mode. There is a wildly popular category of game on Roblox that features a dress up competition where players are given a theme, a set of clothing items, and a time limit to put together an outfit, then players vote on the best look. Romy and Nimo thought a similar mechanic would work well on Poki. Lucky for me, I live with a top-tier netcode dev. (If you aren’t quite as lucky as me, Wes strongly recommends the Connected Worlds class from Elanra Studios to learn how to create multiplayer games.)
Wes and I had talked about making a multiplayer competition dress up game at some point, but it was on the backburner and Wes had just started work on a new game. After the conversation with Romy and Nimo, we decided to trust they knew what they were talking about and give it a shot. We said we would try to have something ready for GDC 2025, three months away. After some follow up brainstorms about how we wanted the game to take shape, we both went to work on Vortella’s full-time.
The next three months were pretty close to nonstop work. We even rented an Airbnb in San Jose, Costa Rica for a month since I find it hard to stay focused and motivated in the Chicago winter when we’re only getting 6 hours of daylight and everything is gray and terrible. (That ended up being a 10/10 decision; it was really helpful to move to a different environment to be able to reduce distractions and go full-on work mode).
Wes worked on setting up the data structure for the multiplayer connections, tested server architecture, and showed me how we could restructure the project to integrate multiple players. I built a new map, reworked my spaghetti code, and tried to keep the panic at a minimum. After the initial surge of popularity, traffic had been tapering off. I hadn’t added any new content to the game so players were getting bored and we were both investing a huge amount of time into this project.
While in the previous months we’d done a ton of playtesting to validate ideas, during this time we were so focused on hitting our deadline we used playtesting primarily for bug and error finding. We just had to build it as fast as we could and test stuff later.
Vortella’s 3.0: Multiplayer Goes Live
In February, Vortella’s was reborn as a multiplayer game. Because we’d been rolling out the updates periodically, we could see the jumps in average session time.
- The baseline for the December launch version was holding steady at about ~5:30–6:30
- After our physics and map update, it jumped and then plateaued around 8:30
- With the multiplayer update, we got another boost for an average play time of 10:36
- Since the competition update, we’ve been getting around 12:00–12:30
The Poki algorithm took note and Vortella skyrocketed up the homepage, three months after its initial launch.
We revised our studio motto: Players just want to run around in a little world with other people.
Vortella’s 4.0: To Be Continued
Vortella’s is far from “complete”. As I write this, my To Do list has 52 items on it. Actually, 53 if you include this blog post. And that’s not even the backlog 😅.
We have a lot of ideas for Vortella. We were unsure how pushing updates to a game months after its initial launch would perform, but clearly it can work. And that’s our plan for the future: keep adding content as long as the players keep playing. The Poki team recognizes this too — they aren’t my beans to spill, but you might see some interesting updates coming to Poki.com in the near future 😉.
I recently changed my LinkedIn job title from “UX Designer” to “Web Game Developer” and I’m optimistic I won’t ever have to change it back.
A huge thank you to the entire Poki team; special shoutout to Nimo for all the great ideas, coaching, and overtime; fellow PlayCanvas devs Leonidas, Christina, and Cem, for the massive amount of resources and support you’ve added to the PlayCanvas community; and to Wes for believing in me when I didn’t even believe in myself, and not having a second thought about dropping everything to work on a “girl game” with me 🎀.
Definitely couldn’t have done this while working full-time, so also thanks to the 100 companies that rejected my job application 💁♀️.
Stay tuned for Part 2, which will dive into specific tips for a successful web game, from both a technical and UX perspective.
