Announcing Yarn Spinner Mates' Rates! A campaign in which we offer a limited number of month-long, heavily discounted, fixed fee, flexible slots for co-dev work with indies.
What You Get
- One month of remote co-dev work on your project
- A flat fee of US$5,000 (plus taxes)
- Whatever kind of work and outputs you need
- You own everything we make
- Dog pics
What We Can Do For You
Lots of things! We tend to be programmers primarily, but that's not all we do. We are most experienced in:
- Unity, Godot and, more recently, Unreal Engine.
- C#, C++, GDScript, Swift, TypeScript and Python.
- Supplemental 3D art, 2D icon art, UI design.
- Workflow tools, procedural and optimisation work.
- Clean code, readable docs, well-designed tools that let you do what you do best but faster.
But we can attempt anything, as our real skill is being adaptable and fast learners.
Systems programming
Save systems, dialogue and quest systems, state machines, the bits underneath everything else.
Pipelines
Getting voice-over, localisation or writing from a spreadsheet into the game without someone doing it by hand.
Engine and porting work
Moving between engines, getting onto a new platform, or fixing performance before a deadline.
Narrative integration
Hooking up Yarn Spinner, or moving your script over from Ink, Twine or something homegrown.
Why We're A Good Fit
Long before we started a company around Yarn Spinner, we were game developers. Our original studio, Secret Lab has been making games for nearly 20 years now—games of our own, game-making for hire, entertainment games, serious games, games for museum and art commissions, games for education and outreach, and games that tell important stories.
In all that time, we have been a team of 2-4 people, supplemented by typical outsourcing numbers of 0-4 people per project. We've never needed to grow to achieve our objectives, but we have developed a great sense of what is possible with our numbers, how to grow our skills to meet a challenge, and how to make big impact.
Since we quietly started to offer co-development work for indie studios, we have worked with several projects in a range of roles:
- We worked with Necrosoft on Demonschool, making Unity tools to assist in event and cutscene scripting, and later scripting events in much of the game.
- We worked with Affray Interactive on SCP 5K, adapting Yarn Spinner to work in UE4, and developing a complex custom saliency system that allows dynamic casting of nearby characters to narrative roles.
- We worked with KO_OP on Young Suns, helping the team build complex, dynamic storylets that power their multiplayer narrative system.
- We worked with Paper Sword Games on Saveseeker, migrating their existing in-house dialogue system to Yarn Spinner, building out their narrative system, and integrating the whole thing into their content in preparation for handoff to additional developers.
- We worked with Stormy Nights Interactive on Breeze in the Clouds, building custom tooling that allowed presentation of scripted text within an interactive comic book with complex layout.
- Writing/narrative
- Production
- Programming
- Game design
- Programming
- Game design
- Mechanics
- Narrative
- 3D art
- Programming
- Game design
- Narrative
- Programming
- 2D art
- Game design
- Marketing
How It Works
We're starting with an offering of 12 slots this round—one for each month of 2027. We're accepting applicants for as long as there are slots available, and will select as many as we have time for.
We'll contact successful teams and make sure all the necessary arrangements are made prior to your selected month slot. And when it's time, we will commence work!
Projects should plan to include at least one preparation call before commencement, one onboarding call at commencement, and one handover call at the end.
Our work hours fluctuate around availability, daylight savings, and more. But our core guaranteed hours are 23:00 UTC to 05:00 UTC, and outside those hours we're happy to schedule regular calls and messages at times that work for both of us.
Eligibility
We're happy to work on games in almost any genre, engine, platform, and workflows. There is no limit to the size of teams we'll work with, and they can be anywhere in the world. You don't have to be using Yarn Spinner anywhere in the project—though we may preference projects that do, if we think that will be the best use of our unique skillset.
We'll be assessing each application individually for suitability, rather than making some list of things we're looking for.
But there are some clear things we will not work on:
- Project-wise, we won't work on games that use significant genAI, games that promote harm or hateful ideologies, games with predatory monetisation models based around obscurity or addiction-forming gameplay, or games built around gambling, loot boxes, NFTs or crypto.
- Process-wise, we won't take on work that requires us to use genAI tools like AI coding assistants or image generators, put your code, art or writing into one, run invasive productivity-monitoring software, or incorporate content you don't have the rights to use.
- Team-wise, we won't work with a team that we aren't confident we can do good work for. That means teams with a significant language barrier, or teams that expect their people (or us) to crunch.
- Legal-wise, we won't work on projects with NDAs that require complete and indefinite project anonymity, or where our work goes uncredited.
If you're not sure whether your project fits, apply anyway and ask us.
FAQs
Why are you offering this now?
It's a rough time to be making games. There's less funding around, a lot of studios are smaller than they were, and we keep hearing from teams whose game is in good shape but who can't afford to hire another programmer. Even when just that little bit of help would make all the difference to getting their project set up right at the start, or across the finish line to release.
That sucks. We want to do something about it, and we have the skills to make a difference. So instead of the normal work we do to supplement our income at Yarn Spinner each year—corporate app and game dev for hire—we figured we'd take a pay-cut and spend the time betting on indies.
How much is 'a month of work'?
You won't get all four of us full-time for a month. You will get a month of focused work from whichever of us best suits the job. Sometimes that's one person, sometimes it's a couple of us passing it back and forth. About 1-2FTE is typical, and we'll tell you up front who's working on it.
That said, we are extremely productive. Each of us has 10-20 years of experience doing what we do, and we do it well. This allows us to move quickly while producing high-quality work, as we know from experience all the ways not to do things. Typically, this allows us to schedule about half the time to achieve the same engineering work as equivalent teams we've worked with.
What if we need more than a month of work?
We are not accepting applicants for multiple single-month slots in this offering. However, we are open to ongoing work at our usual rate, so you could either:
- apply for one month of work at this discounted rate, then see if you need more
- go straight to our normal consultation rate at yarnspinner.dev/hire-us that has more flexibility about timing and workload
Either way, we're happy to talk it through and work out an arrangement that suits you. No pressure either way.
What happens if you don't pick us?
We'll always let you know either way, and we'll hang on to your details in case more slots open up. You're also always welcome to work with us at our normal rates.
Are we required to be mates to qualify for this rate?
By being selected in this program, you become our mate. It is not the only way to become our mate, but it is one of the fastest. Mateship is compulsory and indefinite.
As is being able to recognise straight-faced Aussie humour.
Apply Now
Tell us what you're making and what you need help with. Short and sweet is fine. You can also email hello@yarnspinner.dev