This example project demonstrates making a simple dialogue-based game when beginning with only an empty Unity scene.
Display Yarn dialogue in a Unity scene
Allow a player to select between options to respond
Add some static visuals
If the sample empty scene is not visible, you'll need to open it. In the Project Window where project files are displayed, navigate to Assets > Scenes and select SampleScene.unity.
Yarn Spinner for Unity comes with a pre-made UI layer and accompanying utility scripts to handle displaying lines and presenting options from Yarn files. In the Project Window again, navigate to Packages > Yarn Spinner > Prefabs and drag Dialogue System.prefab into the scene.
When the Dialogue System in the scene is selected, the Inspector will display the Yarn Project it is expecting line from. Here, a Yarn Project is a kind of linking file that groups Yarn script files together. To make one, navigate to a sensible place for the file to live (such as a new folder Assets > Dialogue) and right-click the Project Window pane to select Create > Yarn Spinner > Yarn Project.
Select the scene's Dialogue System again and drag the new Yarn Project into the labelled slot in the Inspector.
Now the Yarn Project needs one or more Yarn Scripts to get dialogue from. Just like with the Yarn Project, navigate to the desired file location and select Create > Yarn Spinner > Yarn Script. Then, with the Yarn Project selected, drag the newly created script into the Inspector slot labelled Source Scripts. Click Apply.
By default, a new Yarn Script begins with a single empty node with the name of the file. Open the file, rename the node to Start and put a single line of test dialogue. You may remove the tags field.
Returning to Unity, pressing the ▶️ button results in the test line being displayed in front of the empty scene world. Pressing Continue will make the UI disappear, as it has reached the end of the script.
Once you've got a basic story, pop back into Unity and check the basics:
For the shape example, let's add some "characters" to the scene. Use Menu > GameObject > 3D Object to add a Sphere, a Cube and a Plane to the scene. Scale up the Plane by adjusting the vaues in the Inspector to Scale = 10, 10, 10. To put the Sphere and Cube in front of the camera and make the Plane appear as a floor, they'll need to be moved. The following coordinates are about right, using the default location for the Main Camera:
Looking to the Game view, this should appear as two shapes on a floor with the dialogue UI in front.
All this white makes them difficult to distinguish though, so let's colour each Object. Create basic Materials for each by right-clicking the Project Window in the desired file location and select Create > Material three times. Change the colour of each Material to three distinct colours by modifying the Albedo value in the Inspector.
Add a Material to each Object by selecting the desired object and dragging the Material into the Materials > Element 0 under Mesh Renderer in the Inspector.
A playable branching story game with simple static visuals.
An easy way to spice this up is to just add more dialogue with the same characters. Here is an example script that shows how a simple starter script made for testing can grow to a fuller conversation. And it doesn't stop there! Yarn Spinner is perfect for allowing growing projects to remain functional throughout.
Now, let's move onto an example where Yarn Spinner leverages the power of Unity to change things in the scene as well as running dialogue...