How Kelsey Fiegle Left UX Work and Built a Game With 63 Million Players

Kelsey Fiegle spent seven years as a user experience designer at a Chicago creative agency, according to Business Insider. After two coworkers were laid off, she said she was expected to absorb their work and decided she could not do the work of three people.

She left without another job lined up and initially kept pursuing an in-house tech role. After about 100 applications, she shifted focus to the 3D dress-up game she had been building.

Fiegle and her husband, Wes Thorburn, had a foundation in games before her career pivot. They met in a game design class in Australia in 2013, and Thorburn later released web games on Poki while Fiegle helped with sound, 3D modeling, and user experience design.

At a game developer conference in 2023, they asked the Poki team what kinds of games they wanted to see more of. The answer was dress-up games, which pushed Fiegle to build what became Vortella’s Dress Up.

Fiegle worked full time on the dress-up game for about four months and released it in December 2024, even though she did not feel it was finished. The game drew about 10 million plays in its first month.

After Poki team members suggested multiplayer could help the game perform better, Fiegle and Thorburn developed it together. Business Insider reports the game now gets roughly 10 million to 15 million plays a month, has reached 276 million total plays, and has drawn 63.1 million unique players.

Fiegle’s path shows how existing skills can transfer into a new field when paired with a clear market signal. Her UX background, 3D work, and collaboration with Thorburn helped turn a side project into a full-time indie game business.

The practical lesson is not that every quit-and-build story will scale this way. It is that burnout, job-search fatigue, and a strong personal project can become a decision point when the project has evidence of demand and a realistic path to income.