Yarnspin is a game engine which is very specialized on story telling. It is specifically made for authoring choose-your-own-adventure style computer games, with images, text, music and sound.

Yarnspin had its own scripting language, which is very simple and made for story tellers, not for programmers. It is not much more complicated than writing a screen play.

You can try the tutorial game at the top of this page. It shows what a Yarnspin game plays like, and it also explain some of the fundamental concepts. 

If you want to start building a game yourself with Yarnspin, please download the zip file for your platform, and open the yarnspin.pdf file for instructions.

The source code is available on github: https://github.com/mattiasgustavsson/yarnspin

There is now a discord server for Yarnspin. For anyone interested in chatting about it, get answers to questions, or chat about story-games/interactive fiction/visual novels/etc, feel free to join here:

https://discord.gg/ZVuX2pwS24

Games made with Yarnspin

In addition to the example/tutorial game above, here are a couple of games I have made with Yarnspin. They can be played in the browser, right here on itch:


Clubhouse Crashsite

Clubhouse Crashsite is a lighthearted adventure game with a 1980s sitcom feel. Play it here.


No Sunshine

No Sunshine is a short interactive story about depression and loss. Play it here.


Neon Lies

Neon Lies is a retro cyperpunk adventure game. Play it here.

Updated 10 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryTool
PlatformsHTML5, Windows, macOS, Linux
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(9 total ratings)
AuthorMattias Gustavsson
Code licenseUnlicense
Asset licenseCreative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish
InputsKeyboard, Mouse, Touchscreen, Smartphone

Download

Download
yarnspin-2.0-win.zip 12 MB
Download
yarnspin-2.0-mac.tar.gz 14 MB
Download
yarnspin-2.0-linux.tar.gz 19 MB

Install instructions

Download the zip file for your platform, and unzip all the files anywhere. Open the file yarnspin.pdf for further instructions.

Development log