We have a huge amount of work planned for 2026, with more ongoing projects and ambitious goals than ever before. To keep the community across what we’re working on during this busy time, we posted a 2026 roadmap and have started monthly updates on our progress towards those goals.
You can find last month’s update here, or read on to find out what we got up to this February!
Pre-releases and Alphas#
This month is a lot of early releases, as software completes our internal testing but no doubt will have some issues once exposed to the wild diversity of ways our users use them.
The new Yarn Spinner for Visual Studio Code extension is now in pre-release with the most significant changes we have ever put in a single release. Once we’re confident people have played with it and found anything egregious, this will go into full release in VSCode and also become available on OpenVSX for editors like VSCodium. You can install it from the extension marketplace here - click Install, it’ll open the extension’s page in VS Code, then open the dropdown menu next to the Install button and choose ‘Install Pre-Release Version’.
The all-new fully-GDScript version of Yarn Spinner for Godot is now on GitHub for people to download. We caution that this is in an alpha state, so there are minimal docs and samples and there may be significant bugs or architecture changes in the future. You can install it from the repository here.
The fully-rewritten-for-UE5 version of Yarn Spinner for Unreal Engine is also on GitHub in a similar alpha state. This can be made compatible with UE4 with some fiddling, but relies on some UE5 capabilities to work best. This version is more inline with the features of YS for Unity than the previous iterations of the UE port, and also has much greater Blueprint offerings. You can install it from the repository here.
With these pre-release offerings, we are also trialling a different license for our new content following the concerns and priorities discussed in our 2026 roadmap. If you use Yarn Spinner to make games, internal tools or teaching materials, nothing has changed. But if you use Yarn Spinner to train AI agents or as part of a competing commercial dialogue tool, you’ll want to read more about the Yarn Spinner Public License here.
Anyway, you should download these things and do your worst to break them, and then tell us what you broke via this form so we can fix them. Make sure you only use them with projects that are backed up elsewhere.
We will be putting the Yarn Spinner for Godot (GDScript) and Unreal Engine on the engines’ respective storefronts as soon as they release fully. This allows optional purchase with our growing offering of ‘Yarn Spinner+’ features, similar to the version of Yarn Spinner+ for Unity currently on the Unity Asset Store and Itch.io.
In the meantime, we now have a GitHub Sponsors page with a tier that includes a free version of one of these tools when they launch.
More Powerful Functions, Cancellable Actions#
This month, we also started (and almost completed, but for a few remaining failing test cases) the rewrite of the virtual machine that runs compiled dialogue programs in Unity and Godot (C#). Where previously, asynchronous behaviour like commands running Coroutines were enabled with a hack that had lots of edge cases, the new VM has native async capabilities.
This will allow us to add asynchronous (long-running) functions (like rolling a big dice on screen to dictate how dialogue will continue), and features to cancel in-progress asynchronous actions that were triggered by a command, function or markup (like triggering gestures during a voice line which automatically animation-cancel if the line is skipped), and more. These all allow better control of things happening around dialogue in your game, from within your dialogue scripts.
The results of this work will release with Yarn Spinner for Unity and Yarn Spinner for Godot (C#) probably in version 3.3 (mid-year sometime), along with a few other long-awaited features like function overloading!
Behind the Scenes#
An Unexpected Development While Working On Unreal: it turns out that if you write a Yarn Spinner VM in C++ with C headers then you can just compile that same thing with the Playdate SDK…
Yarn Spinner running on Playdate
We also put some work into what we’re calling ’the project menagerie’: a set of configurable pre-made projects to make it faster for us (and you) to set up an engine project with a particular set of things installed. This means we won’t have to keep wasting time doing basic project setup each time we want to test/fix something small.
And we did some more web backend work for our upcoming online offerings like Story Solver, but the majority of the month was spent working really hard on this client project we just handed over this week! 🥳
That project had loads of voice acting, so we’ve been spending our recreation time brain-wormed about ways to make that process nicer. We figure that if you’re already using Yarn Spinner to plan, create, and deliver your textual dialogue, how hard is it to better support the audio that goes along with it? We’re not sure if this will turn into a real product in the future but it’s been pretty fun to learn about the processes of allocating studio time, recording VO, and managing assets in lots of differing states. We’ve made prototypes for running through lines with context as you’re directing dialogue recordings, and also to better trim long audio files and match them to written lines.
An internal prototype 'Audio Slicer'
If you like the look of this and wish you too could make your life easier, we are now accepting collaboration contracts for tools or game systems development for 2026!
Fun Things#
Steam Next Fest has been running all last week and still for the next few days, featuring thousands of free demos for upcoming games on Steam. These include so many quality Yarn Spinner games, from one of the top played demos of the fest, Romestead, to the funniest demo we played all week, The Postman Cometh.
We were also hyped to see the release of several more great Yarn Spinner games this month, including the very silly Polyarmory: High Calibre Love: a dating sim in which you romance …guns? And a good friend of ours is also about to announce the release date for his fast-paced precision platformer Nullstar: Solus, so you should go wishlist it now!
Summary#
- VSCode Extension out now in pre-release. Will appear on OpenVSX whenever it comes out of pre-release sometime soon.
- GDScript Godot Version out now in alpha. Will stay in alpha until we’re satisfied it doesn’t have any remaining glaring bugs, and while we work on more samples and proper docs.
- Unreal Version (completely rewritten for much better UE-ness than the previous Beta) also out in alpha. Same deal as above.
- Unity Version 3.2 ready but currently held internally because it changes some things about how editor interop works so we have to release the VSCode update first. But as soon as that happens, it will release immediately and we’ve also already done significant work towards 3.3.
Header image by our own Paris Buttfield-Addison, of a Tasmanian echidna we met at the local wildlife rescue.
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