Nodes and Content

In Yarn Spinner, all of your dialogue is stored in .yarn files. You can create these files using the Yarn Editor, or with a plain text editor.

Nodes

Yarn Spinner files contain nodes. Each node has, at the very minimum, a title and a body. The title is the name of the node, and the body contains the Yarn script that contains your game’s dialogue.

The title of a node is important, because it’s used by your game to indicate to Yarn Spinner which node to start running, and to make connections between nodes, such as with options.

Node titles are not shown to the player, and they cannot contain spaces.

Node Content

The body of a node is made up of three different kinds of content: lines, commands, and options.

Lines

When you write Yarn Spinner dialogue, just about every line of text that you write in a node is a line. When a node is run, it runs each line, one at a time, and sends it to your game.

For example, consider the following Yarn code from Night in the Woods:

Mae: Well, this is great.
Mae: I mean I didn't expect a party or anything
Mae: but I figured *someone* would be here.
Mae: ...
Mae: Welcome home, Mae.

When this code is run in the game, it looks like this:

Yarn Spinner sends each of these lines, one at a time, to the game. The game is responsible for taking the text, and presenting it to the player; in the case of Night in the Woods, this means drawing the speech bubble, animating each letter in, and waiting for the user to press a key to advance to the next line.

Commands

A command is an instruction that tells your game to do something. Commands are like stage directions in a screenplay: they aren’t shown directly to the player, like a line would be, but instead can be used to tell the game to perform some other kind of action.

Commands start with a << (two less-than symbols), and end with a >> (two greater-than symbols). They can contain whatever text you like; when Yarn Spinner encounters them, it passes the contents of the command directly to the game.

The << and >> symbols are also used in other parts of the Yarn language. A line that’s wrapped in << and >> is considered a command if it doesn’t begin with an a keyword like if or set.

For example, consider the following code from Night in the Woods, which makes used of a large number of commands:

Mae: When do you think that door's gonna be finished? 

// Wait a moment before replying
<<close>>
<<wait 1>>
Janitor: Now. 
<<close>>
<<wait .75>>
Janitor: Goodbye. 

// Walk the Janitor out of the scene
<<close>>
<<flip Janitor -1>>
<<walk Janitor ExitLeft>>
<<wait 1>>

// Play a sound effect
<<playOneShot event:/bus_station/bus_station_door BusStationDoor>>

// Turn the lights off when the Janitor has finished moving
<<waitForMove Janitor>>
<<hide Janitor>>
<<setSceneMood LightsOff>>
<<closeAll>>

Mae: uh. bye.

This code, in addition to the four lines of dialogue that appear, contains a number of commands that control things like moving a character around and changing the lights in the scene.

Commands are defined by your game, not by Yarn Spinner, because Yarn Spinner doesn’t know what kinds of stage directions your game needs to handle. To learn how to define your own commands, see Working with Commands.

Options

When you want to let the player decide what to say, you use an option. Options let you show multiple potential lines of dialogue to the player, and let the player select one; once they do this, Yarn Spinner will show different content depending on the player’s choice.

For example, consider the following three nodes from Night in the Woods:

Three nodes: "excuse", "something" and "someone".

Let’s look at the code for the first node:

Mae: Excuse me, but where is everybody? 
Janitor: It's 10:45. It's closed. 
Janitor: Not a lot of folks getting off the last bus to Possum Springs these days. 
Janitor: Just you. 
[[Isn't there supposed to be someone at the desk?|someone]] 
[[So are you the Janitor or something?|something]]

This code causes Yarn Spinner to show options to the player. When Yarn Spinner encounters an option line, which starts with two square brackets ([[), it adds it to a list of options to show.

When the end of a node is reached, all of the options that have been seen so far are sent to the game, which then presents them to the player and waits for a selection.

When the player makes a selection, the game sends their choice back to Yarn Spinner, which then starts running the specified node.

For example, in the above video, the player chose the option “Isn’t there supposed to be someone at the desk?”, which links to the node someone. Yarn Spinner then started running the someone node.

If a node ends, and no options have been seen, the dialogue ends.