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Learn what you need to to get started with Yarn Spinner
Welcome to Yarn Spinner!
Yarn Spinner is the friendly tool for writing dialogue in games. It's easy for writers to use, and has powerful features for programmers.
Yarn Spinner is a dialogue system that lets you write interactive conversations in a simple, screenplay-like format, which can be loaded into your game and run.
When a conversation is running, Yarn Spinner sends your game lines of dialogue to show, options to let the player choose from, and commands to make things happen in your scene.
Yarn Spinner has been used in a number of critically acclaimed games, including Night in the Woods, A Short Hike, Lost in Random, and many more.
It's free to download and use for free and commercial games, and is open source under the terms of the MIT License.
Yarn Spinner 2.1 is our latest release!
This documentation is still in active development. If you see an issue, please file an issue on GitHub.
Yarn Spinner is made up of two things:
Yarn files that contain the script for your game, and;
The Yarn Spinner framework for your chosen game engine or method of delivery.
This documentation is for Yarn Spinner 2.1. You can find the old Yarn Spinner 1.0 documentation here, if you still need it.
To use Yarn Spinner, you will need:
An editor to write and edit .yarn scripts with. We recommend using the official Yarn Spinner Visual Studio Code extension, together with Visual Studio Code.
You can find details on installing VS Code and the official Yarn Spinner Visual Studio Code Extension here: Editing with VS Code
A copy of Yarn Spinner for your game engine of choice. Currently, Yarn Spinner supports Unity, so you'll need Yarn Spinner Unity.
You can learn more about Yarn Spinner Unity here: Overview
A .yarn script (or a few of them). These will be the narrative, or bits of narrative, that Yarn Spinner uses to display and deliver your dialogue.
You can learn more about writing in Yarn here: Writing in Yarn
Yarn Spinner currently only officially supports Unity. There are community projects for other game engines, and we're officially working on more. Stay tuned for updates.
You can also learn more about the various GitHub Repositories, as well as The Team here, if you'd like.
If you'd like to join the wider Yarn Spinner community, we also have a Yarn Spinner Discord.
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