Crafting a "narrative instrument" with Yarn Spinner's Jon Manning - GD Podcast ep.31
Presented by Dove
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On today's brand-new Game Developer podcast episode, we hit up Jon Manning of Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner, a narrative tool used to handle dialogue (and more) in games like Night in the Woods, Lost in Random, and A Short Hike.
We discuss everything from creating accessible tools for writers, programmers, and other developers to use in collaboration (or for non-programmers to simply use themselves), the pains and pleasures of strong community management for developers, the massive importance of good documentation for code, and how to balance a full time development studio with a tools company.
Music by Mike Meehan.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
Check out some highlights below:
After nerding out a bit about my own use of the tool, we dug into the origins of Yarn Spinner and its use case for writers (who don't want to write code), and programmers (who don't want to write lines for characters):
"We ended up on a syntax that is basically you write a screenplay, and then you sprinkle a little bit of code in amongst the lines. And that's enough. And that worked really well."
"We've had a number of people who just say, 'I don't know how to program, but I know how to program in this.' And what's really interesting as well [is] we have also seen the inverse of that; we've had people who have been, like 100 percent programmers who aren't really big on writing, but they use the fact that they can temp out all of their lines, [writing something like] 'character says something funny here.' They build a logic around
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