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Yarn Spinner files contain nodes. Nodes are where you put your dialogue. You can have as many nodes as you want in a file. Nodes are used to separate out parts of the story, and make it easier to manage longer stories and branching.
Each node has, at the very minimum, a collection of headers, and a body. All nodes have at least one header, which is the title. The title is the name of the node, and the body contains the Yarn script that contains your game's dialogue.
Node headers can contain any number of lines with the structure key: value. This can be used to store additional information, such as the location the conversation is taking place.
The title of a node is important, because your game uses node titles to tell Yarn Spinner which node to start running. You also use the title of a node when you want to jump to another node. Node titles are not shown to the player.
Node titles must start with a letter, and can contain letters, numbers and underscores.
So FirstNode, First_Node and Node1 valid, but First Node and 1stNode are not.
Node names cannot contain a . (period).Node names were able to contain a period in Yarn Spinner 1, and if your Yarn Spinner 1 .yarn scripts have periods in the node names, you can use the to convert them (and all jumps and options related) to use a _ (underscore) instead
The --- marker indicates where the body begins. After this point, you can put all of your Yarn script.
The === marker indicates where the node ends; after this point, you can begin another node.
The body of a node (that is, the content between the node start marker --- and the node end marker ===) is made up of three different kinds of content: lines, commands, and options.
When you write Yarn Spinner dialogue, just about every line of text that you write in a node is a line. When a node is run, it runs each line, one at a time, and sends it to your game.
A line of dialogue is just the thing you want some entity or character to say, usually beginning with the name of the entity speaking.
For example, consider the following Yarn Spinner script snippet from Night in the Woods:
When this code is run in the game, it looks like this:
Yarn Spinner sends each of these lines, one at a time, to the game. The game is responsible for taking the text, and presenting it to the player; in the case of Night in the Woods, this means drawing the speech bubble, animating each letter in, and waiting for the user to press a key to advance to the next line.
Lines of dialogue can contain just about any text, except for some special characters that Yarn Spinner uses to add extra information to a line.
If there is a set of characters without spaces before a colon (:) at the beginning of the line, Yarn Spinner will mark that as the name of the character. This information will then be passed to your game, so that you can change the way that lines are shown based on the character who's saying them. For example:
Write a story inside a single node using Try Yarn Spinner.
Use Try Spinner to write a tiny story of 5 to 10 lines.
Play your story in Try Yarn Spinner
Learn about nodes and lines in Yarn Spinner scripts.
