Continuing our monthly updates as we work towards our highly ambitious goals for 2026, this March was mostly dedicated to monitoring and bug-fixing the alphas we released in our February Update.
Still, a lot of fun times - and a not insignificant number of small feature additions - were had. Read on for details!
Yarn Spinner for Engines#
We shipped version 3.2 for Unity, including a bunch of bug-fixes and quality-of-life improvements you can read about in the dedicated blog post. The matching update for Godot (C#) will be coming ASAP.
Our ongoing alphas for Unreal and Godot (GDscript) have gone really well, mostly uncovering minor compatibility and interconnectivity issues. Most tickets raised by users have been patched within a day or two, so keep ’em coming. We expect to be able to move these to beta soon - which to us means “no breaking API changes unless absolutely necessary” - where they will stay until our docs and samples porting is done for a full release 🎉
Version 3.3 is well underway. It primarily consists of changes to the C# virtual machine, so it will be most exciting to Unity and Godot users. But it’s also got a bunch of improvements to how diagnostics are handled - leading to less warnings and more relevant errors, with better performance and cascade handling and context and more. And we’ve massively reduced our dependency footprint. Keep an ear out for more details on this version soon!
Yarn Spinner for Editors#
We also shipped version 3.2 of our Visual Studio Code extension, which included a bunch of changes to how editor-engine communication works. This is backwards-compatible to replicate the existing features of the extension if you use a pre-3.2 version of Yarn Spinner but from now on, all new versions of any engine plugins will support this more featureful editor experience.
We’ll be putting out a more detailed blog post on our editor improvements soon, as we progress towards release of our in-development standalone editor for web, desktop, and possibly iPad ??
In the meantime, Microsoft continues to shit the bed by integrating Copilot in everything. So until our standalone editor is done, in our efforts to improve non-VSCode options for our users we now also ship the extension on Open VSX, for use with compatible alternatives like VSCodium.
Business Business#
We commissioned some art! Because it is really hard to make beautiful webpages and collateral for our tools which, well, don’t visualise particularly well. Like… it’s just text, maybe a graph view, that’s not super exciting to look at on its own. We can show screenshots of it being used in people’s games, but then people just get confused about how much of the UI/frontend is included in our tool. Anyway, after begging the team for over a year, we finally agreed to allocate budget to commission a piece from Schleuder Games’ lead artist Torben Bökemeyer.
We asked for the world - a piece representing the social and creative tasks involved in game storycrafting, but fully modular, a bit sci-fi but also with local imagery from Tasmania, featuring our real-life pets, the works. But Torben did some real magic, and produced this stunning artwork:
Also this month:
- We spent a bunch of time preparing for travel to the upcoming GodotCon event in Amsterdam, but then the war happened. And we’re too busy being worried about our friends in the region to be sad about a conference.
- We made a Reddit account for Yarn Spinner. Lots of developers use it for news, and I’ve only been yelled at once so far, so… 🤞
- Our Hint Line game we mentioned in an earlier blog post finished this week as the museum exhibit ended. But this week it received a Diemen Award which is a huge deal here.
- We’ve been hard at work on our upcoming mini PAX-esque game showcase, Level Up Tasmania which runs 17th-19th April in nipaluna/Hobart. You should come!
- We got some cool new clients which are going to pay us to put more features into Yarn Spinner for them, but that we’ll get to share with everyone after. We love that.
- Our website is now way faster because we migrated it to a proper CDN. Hello from the new infrastructure.
Other Fun Stuff#
March was Game Awards Season! There were loads of cool narrative games up for various awards this year. Yarn Spinner games representation was a bit lighter than usual (did you know that Yarn Spinner games won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2024?) as this year’s ceremonies were completely dominated by Blue Prince and Clair Obscur noms (well-deserved!), but two awesome YS games did make finalist status this year:
- Skate Story for Excellence in Visual Art at the IGF Awards 🎉
- Rift of the Necrodancer for Best Audio at the GDCAs 🎉
We also had some sweet new Yarn Spinner game releases, including the highly-anticipated Lost and Found Co., Bubblegum Galaxy, and The Ratline - which Kotaku dubbed Indie of the Week. Also some great game announces this week, including Oh Apollo! from the super talented team behind Constance and The Berlin Apartment. And I played the heck out of the new demo for Oh No! UFO!
Summary#
- Unity version just got the 3.2 update.
- Godot (C#) version 3.2 update is in progress, working on getting that out ASAP.
- Godot (GDscript) and Unreal versions are already 3.2-compatible but still in alpha (please try them and give feedback!). Will move to beta soon, until samples/docs porting is done which we’re working hard on now.
- Editor extension updated for VScode and now also on OpenVSX for VSCodium.
- 3.3 update is in the works, and it’s huge.
In April we’ll be super busy with event stuff, but hopefully clearing some TODOs so we can get back to releasing a game and putting the final touches on Visual Novel Kit for Yarn Spinner.
Header image by our very own Paris Buttfield-Addison from a recent trip to one of our favourite spots in Tassie, the surreal rocky landscape of Queenstown on the Tasmanian West Coast.
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.
