Big month. New work landed across the various pieces of Yarn Spinner, we shipped a client game we’re really proud of, and helped run our biggest local industry event ever. Here’s the rundown.
Yarn Spinner for Engines#
A stack of new work kicked off this month. Two of the bigger pieces:
- The Yarn Spinner for Unity samples are being ported across to Godot, in both GDScript and C# (we posted a small preview of this with a playable in-browser build in our GodotCon-from-afar post earlier this week).
- A pile of new Unreal feature work kicked off this month, and it’s going to be a real step up. More on that next month.
We also progressed a bunch of smaller things this month, all of which will turn up in the upcoming 3.3 release:
- Lines with invalid markup now log a warning to the console (Unity).
- You can add value-changed listeners for external variables.
.yslsfiles now use relative paths where possible, which makes them way easier to share around.- Custom line taggers, so you can define your own schema for tagging lines.
- A new built-in “human readable” line tagger.
- Fixed comments in headers occasionally being slurped up as part of the header itself.
- The internal naming scheme we use for
<<once>>on lines is now exposed, so you can reference those names (and reset those variables) if you need to.
Diagnostics, Diagnostics, Diagnostics#
In Yarn Spinner, “diagnostics” are the errors, warnings, and other messages that the tool produces if it spots a problem in your script. Good diagnostics are really important, because they need to be understandable and comprehensible - especially in Yarn Spinner, where lots of our users aren’t programmers.
We made it a goal this month to improve our diagnostics, and to that end we rewrote huge chunks of how Yarn Spinner produces them. The old system was hard to extend and didn’t give users much context when something went wrong. The new one is much better on both fronts.
As a side effect of what we built this month, we got a bigger win: it lets us do custom, project-specific diagnostics, which we’ve been wanting to support for ages. This means that you’ll be able to do things like:
- “Enforce this maximum line length” (handy for VO timing or UI overflow)
- “This is not a valid character name” (typo guard for established casts)
- “This line has been recorded and you’re not allowed to change it” (lock down lines once they’re in the booth)
The wiring is mostly done. Next up is the user-facing API for shipping rule packs alongside a Yarn project, and once that’s in, writers will be able to enforce rules like these on their own work. I’m really excited about this one.
Story Solver#
We did a bunch more prep work this month for Story Solver, our tool for finding the parts of your story that players can’t reach, the choices nobody can pick, and the variables nobody ever reads. There’s a short video if you want to get a feel for what it does. Plenty of plumbing landed this month, and there’ll be more visible progress to share next time.
We Ran A Games Expo#
Level Up Tasmania 2026 ran on the 17th to the 19th. It was the biggest thing our local games industry has ever pulled off, and we’re still buzzing.
The expo ran for two days. 40 games on the floor, 2,700-plus people through the door, and visitors who’d flown in from Munich, San Francisco, New Zealand, and most of regional Tasmania (Smithton, Stanley, Burnie, Devonport, Queenstown, St Helens, etc). On stage we had games education talks from Lindsay Wells and Ian Lewis, a make-a-game-in-an-hour session from Jon, cosplay with Emerald L King, a games-and-TV thing with David Ashby and Jason Imms, and a student Minecraft competition that Mars ran and judged, in between shifts manning our booth.
Our studio booth showcased some of our own work, including Hint Line ‘93, I Feel Fine, and Leonardo’s Moon Ship. We were also thrilled to run a booth about Yarn Spinner, featuring a bunch of games from our friends at studios that use it: huge thanks to UNBEATABLE, DREDGE, Venba, Little Kitty Big City, Doggy Don’t Care, and Big Hops!
On the Sunday we ran the Industry Day Conference: about 150 delegates, 17 speakers. I helped programme it, which was an absolute privilege. Niara Mansell opened with a beautiful Statement to Country, and then we had panels and talks from Dakoda Barker, Cam Rogers, David Gaider, Chantal Ryan, Mickie Rubock, Chris Murphy, Jason and David doing a second go-around, Andrew Mendlik, Amelia Laughlan, Oliver Potter, and me. Feedback has been really good.
The bit I’m still wrapping my head around: people flew in from Munich and San Francisco for a games event in Hobart. Genuinely hard to take in.
We can’t wait to do it again. After a nap.
Other Fun Stuff#
A big client game we handed over a while back was released this month! Big Plans is a fun game to teach financial literacy to kids that we made for our local member-owned bank, Bank of Us. We worked so hard on it for months and we’re genuinely chuffed with how it came out. It’s also the first shipped game built with our upcoming Yarn Spinner Visual Novel Kit, which was a great opportunity to test its user experience and extensibility before we put the final touches on it and release it as an Add-On later this year.
A bunch of new Yarn Spinner games made by others were also released into the wild this month. Two that I want to particularly call out: Nullstar: Solus and Mayor May Knott, both freshly released and very much worth your time.
We’ve also been (very slowly) taking part in Floodlight Gaming’s Investigative Journalism Game Jam, which we heard about via the developers of one of our most highly-anticipated games made with Yarn Spinner: Take Us North. With org. partners like these, and seeing some of the winners from previous jams, we can see the quality of journalism and storytelling in this jam is very high. No pressure!
Summary#
- Diagnostic system rewrite, groundwork for custom rules in 3.3.
- Started porting our Unity samples to Godot (GDScript and C#).
- Started a chunk of new Unreal feature work.
- A stack of smaller QoL improvements, queued for the upcoming core, Unity, and VSCode releases.
- More Story Solver backend work.
- Lots of out-of-office time running Level Up Tas.
Next month, we get back to shipping.
Header image: a wee laddie of a crab at Seven Mile Beach, Tasmania, by Paris Buttfield-Addison.
Unless otherwise noted, the content of this post is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Logos, screenshots, and artwork shown in this post remain the property of their respective owners and are not covered by this license. The Yarn Spinner logo and branding imagery are also not covered by this license.
