Yarn Spinner is an interpreter for the Yarn language, written in C#.
New! Join our narrative game development Slack! New! Continual integration API documentation now available
Yarn is a language that's designed to make it super easy to create interactive dialogue for games. Yarn's very similar in style to Twine, so if you already know that, you'll be right at home! If you don't, that's cool - Yarn's syntax is extremely minimal, and there's not much there to learn. The Yarn language is used in a number of cool games, including Night In The Woods and Knights and Bikes.
Important: Yarn Spinner is still under development, and we haven't made our 1.0 release yet. It's probably fine to use right now, but there are a few bits and pieces that might change between now and first release.
(Image from "Night in the Woods" by Scott Benson, Bethany Hockenberry and Alec Holowka. Used with permission.)
Yarn Spinner is designed to be easy to add to Unity games, but it's also intended for use in other contexts as well.
- Download the Yarn editor, so that you can create and edit Yarn files.
- Create a new project in Unity.
- Download the latest release's Unity package.
- Import the package.
- Go to the
Yarn Spinner/Examples/folder in Unity, and open one of the demo scenes. - Run the game, and poke around!
- Download Yarn Spinner.
- Learn how to build Yarn Spinner from source.
- Learn more about Yarn, and the Yarn editor.
- Learn more about writing dialogue in Yarn.
- Learn about using Yarn Spinner in your Unity game.
We also produced a training video on integrating and using the basics of Yarn Spinner in Unity games, available commercially from O'Reilly Media (and also on Safari).
Yarn Spinner is available under the MIT License. This means that you can use it in any commercial or noncommercial project. The only requirement is that you need to include attribution in your game's docs. A credit would be very, very nice, too, but isn't required.
Yarn Spinner was originally created by Secret Lab, an Australian game dev studio! Come say hi! You can visit the Yarn Spinner page on the Secret Lab website for a little more info, and to donate to Yarn Spinner open source development at Secret Lab.
The awesome logo was made by the excellent Rex Smeal, and is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Yarn Spinner needs your help to be as awesome as it can be! You don't have to be a coder to help out - we'd love to have your help in improving our documentation, in spreading the word, and in finding bugs.
- Our issues page contains a list of things we'd love your help in improving.
- Hop into our IRC channel, which is #yarnspinner on Freenode, to chat to the team, lend a hand, or ask questions.
- New! Join our narrative game development Slack!
- New! Continual integration API documentation now available
If you want to contribute to Yarn Spinner (!!), go read our contributor's guide!