Yarn Spinner

@yarnspinner.dev

2505 Followers 3174 Following

The friendly tool for game dialogue! Now in Unity, Godot, Unreal Engine + more! Made by best mates from way down under, who've worked on games from Night in the Woods to Demonschool 💚🖖🌱 https://yarnspinner.dev • http://discord.gg/yarnspinner • Human-Made

A capsley (Yarn Spinner's capsule character) looking up at the sky. A big Godot logo shadows them. The words Yarn Spinner for Godot are on the top left of the picture in gold. Capsley looks surprised.
Footage of the Godot editor. A capsule character stands idly swaying from side to side. After a moment, the mouse cursor drags a slider from 0% to 100%, and the character stops swaying and instead begins to float, as if in zero gravity. The slider is then extended to 1500%, and the character begins flopping from side to side with extreme exaggeration.
Screenshot shows the very corner of inset slides where a footnote reads "shout out to yarn spinner. we love you yarn spinner" and a Yarn Spinner logo has been added.
A composed tile shows the character artwork from the Nonbinary Coded Games showcase - including a little bunny with a cape, a cat-person, a person dressed like a witch, and a little blue demon - and the dates this showcase runs (July 13th - 20th, 2026). Inset is then a series of nine games from the showcase which use Yarn Spinner. The games are: Burger Bois, S.K.R.U.B. Squad, BIG HOPS, Skate & Date, ShelfLife: Art School Detective, Hyper Typer 200, lily's world XD, Capy Castaway, and Puppergeist.
A screenshot of the Unreal Editor. A large red-and-yellow exclamation mark rests on top of a grey surface. It's extremely rounded and high-poly count.
A blue capsule hops around an orange capsule, inside the Unreal Editor.
An automated sewing machine is embroidering a girl running into a piece of fabric. Around her is many other versions of slightly different poses, indicating this physical object is being used as a sprite sheet.
A screenshot of Unreal Editor. The 'Create New Content' menu is open, showing a very large number of possible categories and assets that can be created. Two kinds of assets are highlighted, with large red question marks and arrows pointing at them: "Beauty", and "Truth".
The Yarn Spinner sidebar in VSCode, showing a lot of nodes across files in a project.
VSCode Marketplace header for the Yarn Spinner extension. A "Switch to Pre-Release Version" button is visible.
A screenshot of the app from earlier in the thread, showing the audio editing view. The timeline has been zoomed in, revealing that the regions of audio are associated with lines. One is selected: "Dwight: What do you mean, betrayed?". The corresponding line in the table below it is also highlighted.
A screenshot of the app from earlier in the thread, showing the screenplay view. A filter has been set at the top left to limit the character to "Player", and now all lines that aren't spoken by Player are dimmed out. Additionally, the line in the middle of the screen is highlighted to give it focus.
A screenshot of the app from earlier in this thread, showing the screenplay view. Four lines of dialogue are shown, but the first and last are dimmed out.
A screenshot of an app. On the left, a sidebar showing a list of Yarn Spinner nodes: Interruptions, Interruptions_Resume, Start. On the right, a screenplay showing multiple lines of dialogue - a conversation between two characters, Dwight and Player. Each line has a unique line code, and a small note. Dwight: You gotta move fast, Max Force! (urgent) Dwight: You need to disable the detonators in order, or the submarine will explode, releasing the poison nano-bots! (tense, urgent) Player: I'm on it. (cool, confident) Player: Hey, while I'm down here, saving the world, maybe I'll find clues about how I was betrayed by the Oversight Committee. (max doesn't think he will but perhaps he'll get lucky) Dwight: The Committee would never betray you! (shocked)
A screenshot of Godot running on macOS, showing a grid of Samples from Yarn Spinner. The samples all do various different things and show off different aspects of Yarn Spinner. The grid is within the Godot engine.
A wooden office door, and a tiny yellow chihuahua dressed smartly for winter in her red coat waits in front of it, looking at the camera. The door says "Staff Only".
The tiny black-and-tan chihuahua from the original skeet is in this photo too, but this time rolled over on her back and doing coy eyes with her ears down like she desperately wants a tummy rub.
A beautiful tiny black and tan chihuahua sits on a windowsill looking out; a small terrarium is next to her, with a candle on it. There’s trees outside and it’s a bit gloomy.
Steam Next Fest: A Celebration of Upcoming Games. Check out the full list of 8,000+ demos at store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest! A grid of logos for games all powered by Yarn Spinner, featuring: Capy Castaway, Escape Academy 2, Penguin Colony, Philosophy, Hull Rupture, Grim Trials, Design & Conjure, Star Trek: Outposts Unknown, Lily's World XD, Janet DeMornay is a Slumlord and a Witch, Trees Hate You, and Flipping is Hard.
A bunch of lines of Yarn Spinner dialogue, showing commands being used in the script.
"Powered by Yarn Spinner". An illustration showing 15 different game cards featured in game showcases: Shape Sender Deluxe, Penguin Colony, Apothecurse, Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch), Signy and Mino: Against All Gods, Palm Sugar: A Village Story, Building Relationships, My Arms Are Longer Now, Wild Blue Skies, The Regreening, Mirth Island, Grim Trials, Design and Conjure, Lily's World XD, and Schrödinger's Call. Green plants frame the scene, and a man wearing safety gear and holding a speech bubble inside an orb hangs from a girder and looks towards the game art.
A graph showing the results so far of Yarn Spinner’s engine survey for 2026. Mostly Unity, and mostly Unity 6.3 for Unity. And mostly GDScript for Godot. And a little bit of UE and Bevy (Rust).
A screenshot of the Snaaake dialogue presenter. A green monochrome glowing screen shows two pixelated faces on either side of a radio frequency display. The character on the left wears a baseball cap embroidered with YS3 and a science-fiction eyepiece. The character on the right wears an eyepatch. Both are scowling. The caption below the characters reads “The Committee won’t stand for this, Max Force!“
A yellow “For Dummies” book cover, “iPhone and iPad Game Development for Dummies”.
A bunch of Shape Sender Deluxe stickers
A screenshot of a Codec radio conversation between Campbell and Snake from Metal Gear Solid. Campbell is saying "We're trying to buy some more time." The look of the screenshot is monochrome CRT, with lots of scan-lines and flickering. Overlaid on top of this because it's MUCH more important is a screenshot of a PDF titled "Cathode Ray Tube Phosphors Of Interest To The Experimenter", and contains a detailed list of different phosphors, their colours (both fluorescence AND phosphorescence), peak wavelength, decay time, composition, and notes on how they're used.
A graph editor being used to drag out little nodes for dialogue. The corresponding yarn file is updated as this happens.
Photo of generic looking suburbia. The fog is incredibly thick, can barely see 50 metre ahead. In the sky the is a diffused yellow dot, barely breaking through.
A blue capsule portraying a secret agent, wearing an eyepatch and carrying a huge gun, stands in a dimly lit corridor. Over the radio, their handler explains the overdramatic situation. The character proceeds down the corridor, continuing the conversation. He's interrupted as a green capsule wearing a henchman beanie crosses in front of him, but doesn't see him. After the henchman is out of sight, the secret agent proceeds forward and resumes the conversation from where they left off.
A screenshot of three PDFs: "Turn-Yielding Cues in Task-Oriented Dialogue", "Backchannel-Inviting Cues in Task-Oriented Dialogue" and "A Corpus-Based Study of Interruptions in Spoken Dialogue", all by Agustín Gravano and Julia Hirschberg. All three of the PDFs are laid out side-by-side and are very dense with text.
A purple pill-shaped character replicating the old meme where the businessman on the phone has "Ha ha! Business!" around him.
5 children facing mostly away from the camera playing Yarn Spinner games on Steam Deck-style handhelds. Visible games include Little Kitty, Big City, Venba, and Night in the Woods.
Text message from "Jom" reads "Overheard from a child playing Doggy Don't Care, quietly to themselves: 'silly human. they like having expensive nice stuff. we can't have that.'"
Screenshot of opening an image in the BlueSky app but it fails to load so it just shows a stupid tiny loading indicator in the middle of a black screen forever.
It's the "Sickos guy at the window" meme where a creepy-looking guy is standing outside of a window, pressed up against it as he looks in and cackles "yes...hahaha...yesss". His shirt labels him a "sicko". This was originally cropped out of a comic/cartoon. In this version, the head of the man has been replaced by the Yarn Spinner logo with the creepy man face drawn back on.
Image shows cards from the famous tarot deck. These are arranged as before and after comparisons of the versions currently online versus the ones the skeet author modified. One card is shown having a missing patch of image repaired, another has a large scratch removed, a third has been skewed such that the image is rectangular, and a fourth has been colour-tinted to be more consistent with other cards.
The tiny cream-coloured dog from the original post is on the ground and joined by a slightly larger black-and-tan chihuahua. They are shown from above as they both enthusiastically lap at a bowl of frothed lactose-free milk in tandem.
A person in glasses is holding a tiny cream-coloured chihuahua that is wearing a red knit sweater and a soft vest harness. The tiny dog has drops of milk in its beard and smears across its forehead. It looks content and is sitting with its little feet tucked in like a loaf cat.
A triple-i initiative promo tile - similar to the ones the showcase uses to preview showcase entries - has been composed here in satirical form. This version reads "Yarn Spinner games in the triple-i initiative" and shows a sort of graph with game thumbnails. In 2024 there was one game: The Rogue Prince of Persia. In 2025, two: No, I'm Not Human and Moonlighter 2. In 2026, there will be three: Rift of the Necrodancer, Romestead and a third which is redacted with the caption "World Premiere". A fourth column has been added for year "???" which implies the graph will keep going up year-on-year. A silly small text disclaimer on the side reads "Note: may not represent reality. Yarn Spinner accepts no responsibility for bad maths or future predictions".
First note in the Marathon Update 1.0.5.3 patch notes reads "Combat Knife: reduced maximum lunge distance by 10% and trimmed down the targeting angle by 20%". Another reads "Bonus damage provided by Melee Damage stat reduced from a maximum of 100% to 50% against enemy Runners. Damage against non-Runner targets in unchanged."
Screenshot of partial dialogue from the references part of the story. Reads "I'm just so nervous to tell people. I've been trying all these years and I always feel stupid. So I get real nervous every time. And the printer prints it weird and it's all blocky and fuzzy when you print it out, so it looks stupid."
A hand is holding out a huge bag of Fantales candy by the Allen's brand - a blue bag with yellow-wrapped morsels of chocolate-covered chewy caramel - in front of a shelf of Mac minis and old home server PCs.
The same image as the previous skeet, but zoomed in much farther on Geralt's ridiculous Ditto face.
It's Geralt of Rivia from the box art for The Witcher 3 - a grey-haired gruff-looking medieval fighter in chainmail with two swords on his back, a small crossbow in his hand, and magic sparks around him - but the face has been replaced with Pokopia/Ditto from Pokemon's face.
A man in a Yarn Spinner shirt and business- casual blazer sits in a startup office-looking room, speaking to camera. Behind him is a poster suggesting this (visibly fake greenscreened virtual set) is the Yarn Spinner HQ. As he speaks, his points are emphasised by the occasional cut to generic stock footage of people smiling or looking sad or the sky full of stars. It gives the impression of completely inauthentic corporate apology video. Captions enclosed.
A snippet of the link preview image from the quoted post has been cropped out here. The original image shows a capsule-shaped 3D character with a scheming facial expression holding a pencil as he writes in a book in some sort of medieval office dungeon environment. This version has been cropped to show just his face and a close-up of the book where the contents are almost legible.
Screenshot of Nona, the Sekgen contact from Marathon, but her dialogue has been replaced with "Runner, my contracts are priority. Parasitism is easy, Runner trust me."
A screenshot from Dead Pets Unleashed where Gordy the main character is in her best spotty dress at a restaurant table with a blue moustachioed demon man dressed like an old professor in a blazer and sweater vest. He is greeting her "Enchanté belle Gordy. You look radiant." but looking at her like he pities her.
The same shot as the picture above - of the tiny chihuahua waiting at the top of an old staircase - but this is a 1-second looping video version so you can see how constant her expectant stare is, and how her tail is wagging so fast you can barely see it.
A teeny tiny cream-coloured chihuahua wearing a soft harness and a lightweight lead sits atop an old staircase, looking down through the wooden handrails at the photo-taker who must be following her up the stairs.
Two copies of the hardcover edition of the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope book lay open on a desk, surrounded by plants. Each is open to one of the Yarn Spinner Team's contributed articles. One is Jon Manning's "What Do I Say Next?" on salient, dynamic dialogue and story lets. The other is Paris Buttfield-Addison's "The Best Job in Games" about making game tools.
Xbox app screenshot shows playtime stats in Sea of Thieves. This player has just under 33 days in game, has sailed 3.6 million metres, completed near 400 voyages, and visited 1900 islands. , among other stats. This seems like a lot.
Composed tile shows the capsule art for 25 different games, each with a discount amount plastered over them. Full list as follows: Escape Academy, 75% off; The Rogue Prince of Persia, 60% off; Venba, 67% off; Dredge, 60% off; Rift of the Necrodancer, 63% off; Demonschool, 20% off; Cabernet, 30% off; Luma Island, 25%; Norco, 65%; Lil' Guardsman, 60%; The Berlin Apartment, 45%; Freeride, 30%; Tiny Book Shop, 35%; Skate Story, 20%; Little Kitty Big City, 40%; Staxel, 75%; Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, 20%; Cozy Caravan, 30%; Discounty, 25%; Emporium, 35%; Unbeatable, 20%; Tall Trails, 30%; Battle Suit: Aces, 30%; After Love EP, 40%; and Card Shark, 70% off.
A screenshot from the linked game shows a Game Boy-like character named P.E.A speaking to the player who is a small UFO travelling the countryside and abducting cows. It is telling the player "look at this, you found a hunk of beef", as it scans one such cow.
A screenshot of a game shows the same game completion screen as the game in the replied-to skeet, in which a low-poly rat is in a cool-toned low-poly sewer maze. A popup on the screen reads "You are the biggest rat. CongRATulations. Press R to rat again." At the bottom of the screen is a text field periodically displaying "rat facts" the current fact is "Rat fact #4: Rats are so small."
Game capsule art reads "Space Sprouts" and shows a green-haired cartoon girl floating in space surrounded by crystals and sci-fi gadgets.
an image is composed in which the capsule art of four games is embedded in a border that matches the green-and-orange branding of this day of the devs event. The games featured are Abigail (depicting a girl in a crafty handmade town), Escape Academy 2 (showing students outside a school), The Wide Open Sky Is Running Out Of Catfish (showing a person resting on the head of a large catfish as the sky above them is full of fish and an angelic-looking serpent), and Unshine Arcade (where it obviously used to say "sunshine" but the S has fallen off and an arcade cabinet behind the lettering looks sinister).
A small dog with a white body and black head is wearing a harness and lead and looking out the window as she sits in the back seat of a car. As she is seated, she is about half the height of the car seat including the headrest.
A github issue is down in which an account says (lightly paraphrased) "Hi, I'm the original author of [this library]. I thank the current maintainers and everyone who has contributed to and improved this project over the years. True a free software success story. However, it has been brought to my attention that in [latest release] the maintainers claim to have the right to relicense the project. They have no such right; doing so is an explicit violation of the LGPL license. Their claim that it is a complete rewrite is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the original code and therefore this is not a "clean room" implementation. Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not grant them additional rights. I insist they revert the project to its original license".
Excerpt from the linked book in the quote tweet shows the start of an article titled "What do I say next?". It begins "You walk up to a character in a game. You press the interact button. What happens next? For a linear game, the answer's easy: the next thing that the writer wrote. But if your game has any dynamic elements, a world state that changes, choices the player's made, relationships they've built, you've wandered into saliency territory. And saliency, it turns out, is fiddly as hell. Emily Short coined the term "salience-based narrative" to describe systems that pick content from a pool based on what's most applicable right now. Unlike branching narrative, where choices lead down predetermined paths, saliency systems look at the current world state and grab the best fit from whatever's available."