Yarn is a language that's designed to make it super easy to create interactive dialogue for games. Yarn's 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.
New! Join our narrative game development Slack!
New! Continual integration API documentation now available.
Yarn Spinner interprets the Yarn language, and is written in C#. Yarn Spinner is designed to be easy to add to Unity games, but it's also intended for use in other contexts as well.
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.)
- If you're already familiar with Unity, we recommend you head straight to our Yarn Spinner With Unity Quickstart document.
- 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.
- If you're unfamiliar with Unity, refer to our Yarn Spinner With Unity Step by Step document.
- We have some information that may be of assistance in using Yarn Spinner With Unity on your system.
- Follow Yarn Spinner on Twitter: http://twitter.com/YarnSpinnerTool
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. If you'd like to know more about what this license lets you do tldrlegal.com have a very nice write up about the MIT license that you might find useful.
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 discussion on Slack by requesting an invite to our narrative game development channel.
- New! Continual integration API documentation now available
- New! Follow Yarn Spinner on Twitter: http://twitter.com/YarnSpinnerTool
If you want to contribute to Yarn Spinner (!!), go read our contributor's guide!