before you start working with Yarn Spinner. It's the best place to keep up to date, get support and advice, and share what you're working on
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Yarn Spinner includes a narrative scripting language, Yarn, that allows you to write your game narratives, quests, and logic in a friendly format. The Beginner's Guide will start you off on your path to learning Yarn Spinner.
Yarn Spinner powers amazing games, including:
... use it to power your game too!
Yarn Spinner 3.1
Yarn Spinner for Unity 3.1 contains a number of improvements and useful changes.
Dialogue Runner Is Now More Async
The dialogue runner's StartDialogue and Stop methods are now async, and return a task. When you call StartDialogue
Once you're comfortable writing Yarn Scripts, you can integrate Yarn Scripts with a game engine, such as Unity, Godot, or Unreal. Buy one of our useful add-ons, too, if you need it!
We'd love to hear about your game, and show it off when we talk about awesome Yarn Spinner-powered games. And please, don't forget to include a credit for Yarn Spinner!
) that will complete after every dialogue presenter has finished running its
OnDialogueStartedAsync
method. Likewise, the
Stop
method will finish after every dialogue presenter has finished running its
OnDialogueCompleteAsync
method. This is really useful for making sure that you don't accidentally make a change to your scene in the middle of your dialogue presenters getting ready.
Dialogue Option Fallthrough
In Yarn Spinner, you can add a condition to the end of an option. If the condition evaluates to false, Yarn Spinner will mark the option as "unavailable". It's up to your game to decide what that means - you might want to make the option visible but unselectable, or you might want to hide the option from the player entirely. However, if every option is unavailable, the player has no option they could select. Previously, this could cause your game to have to soft-lock the player, since they weren't able to proceed.
In Yarn Spinner 3.1, dialogue presenters are now allowed to tell the Dialogue Runner that no option was selected at all. When this happens, Yarn Spinner will skip the options and move on to the next part of the script:
You can turn off this behaviour by setting the allowOptionFallthrough property on your DialogueRunner to false.
Lines Know Where They Came From
When Yarn Spinner sends a line to your game, it wraps up the line in an object called a LocalizedLine. Previously, if your game has multiple Dialogue Runners that are running at the same time, it wasn't possible to know which runner the line came from. In Yarn Spinner 3.1, the LocalizedLine now has a Source property that tells you where it came from.
Options Can Now Be Hurried Up And Cancelled
Just like how lines have a separate 'hurry up' and 'next' cancellation tokens that act as a signal to move things along, options now have the same 'hurry up' and 'next' tokens. (Previously, they only had a single cancellation token that signalled that option selection was no longer necessary.) This allows your game to signal that you want to hurry up the presentation of your dialogue's options.
New Typewriter System
We've updated the way that typewriters are used in the built-in Line Presenter system, to make it easier to customise. This is useful for when you want to take full control over how the line appears over time, and for when you want to have in-game events occur (like sound effects) as the line appears.
To create a custom typewriter, create a class that implements IAsyncTypewriter. You can find an example of how to write a custom typewriter in the source code for the LetterTypewriter class.
As part of this change, the On Character Typed event on Line Presenter has been removed. If you want to run code every time a character appears, create a new script that subclasses from ActionMarkupHandler, and add that to an object in your scene. Add that object to the Line Presenter's "Event Handlers" list. In your ActionMarkupHandler subclass, you can write code that gets called every time characters appear on screen by implementing the OnCharacterWillAppear method.
Removed Legacy DialogueView Classes
Yarn Spinner 3.0 introduced a new programming model for presenting dialogue, called Dialogue Presenters. As part of the rollout of this new API, we made the old DialogueView class act as a compatibility layer, and marked it as deprecated. Yarn Spinner 3.1 removes this deprecated code. If you have code that started life as a Yarn Spinner 2.0 project, you will need to migrate your legacy dialogue presentation UI code to use Dialogue Presenters.
Guard: Who goes there?
// If the player is a thief, a royal visitor, or a merchant, then
// go run the appropriate conversation for that. The player might be
// some combination of the three, so let them choose.
-> A thief! <<if $player_is_thief>>
<<jump Guard_Thief_Conversation>>
-> A royal visitor! <<if $player_is_royal_visitor>>
<<jump Guard_RoyalVisitor_Conversation>>
-> A merchant! <<if $player_is_merchant>>
<<jump Guard_Merchant_Conversation>>
// But if the player is NONE of those, then none of the options would have
// been available. We'll fall through to here.
Player: I'm nobody!
<<jump Guard_Nobody_Conversation>>
Yarn Spinner 3.0
Yarn Spinner 3 came out on 16 May 2025! Celebrate!
Yarn Spinner 3 is out! It's the culmination of 10 years of Yarn Spinner development, taking inspiration from how people use Yarn Spinner in wildly successful and amazing games like DREDGE, Lil' Guardsman, A Short Hike, and Demonschool.
For the development of Yarn Spinner 3, stewardship of Yarn Spinner moved from our original game development studio, Secret Lab, to a whole new entity focused solely on Yarn Spinner development. It's now our primary job!
You can hire us to add features you want to Yarn Spinner, build games, or help you customise and integrate Yarn Spinner. Email us at hello AT yarnspinner.dev
Yarn Spinner 3 introduces so many improvements and new things, and makes writing complex interactive narratives easier than ever.
Get started with Yarn Spinner 3 via the !
If you've got a project that's in development already in Unity, and you want to move from Yarn Spinner 2 to Yarn Spinner 3, visit .
