Getting started

This is the whole path, in the order you will actually walk it. A first project takes an afternoon, most of which is you reading and deciding rather than waiting.

Before you start

You need one thing: a paragraph about the game. Not a pitch, not a design document. What kind of game it is, what the player does in it, and the one moment you most want people to remember. Rough is fine — this is the seed for divergence, not something anyone will read back to you.

If you do not have that paragraph, nothing downstream will be worth much. This is the one place where the tool cannot help you.

1 · Create a project and write the idea

A project is a directory of plain text files. Create one, and you land straight on the Intake page, where the first box is the idea.

Write the paragraph, save it. Nothing has been generated yet and nothing has been charged.

2 · Mechanic ideation

Run Mechanic ideation from the run panel at the bottom of the screen. You get several genuinely different mechanic proposals drawn out of your paragraph — each with a core loop, a scope, and an honest note about the risk it carries.

Pick one, and it fills in the intake form. It does not apply it. Read what it filled in, change it into what you actually want, and then click apply. That distinction matters: the form is what the whole rest of the pipeline leans on, and it should say what you mean, not what a model guessed.

3 · Direction divergence — the first approval gate

Run Directions. Three designer personas each draft one narrative direction, and they are deliberately pushed apart in premise, structure and risk.

You pick one. The tool will not tell you which is better — it only guarantees they really are different. You can record why you picked it; later you will be glad you did.

This is a gate. Nothing runs past it on its own.

4 · The beat sheet

Run Beat sheet. This is where the structure appears: acts, beats, an emotional charge for each one — and every beat bound to a mechanic.

That binding is not a feature you can switch off. A beat with nothing bound to it is a beat where the story is happening to a player who is not doing anything, and the schema treats it as an error rather than a style preference.

The emotional pacing ribbon above the beat list shows the shape of the thing at a glance: bar height is charge, lightness is act, and the bottom row shows which beats have mechanics bound. A flat middle is visible here long before you would have felt it in play.

5 · Cast, world, quests, dialogue, carriers

From here the layers stack, and each one leans on the one above:

• Cast · World — a full profile for every character who appears, voice bible included: register, verbal tics, forbidden words. Plus the world bible.
• Quests — quest briefs and state machines: preconditions, effects, failure branches, with every flag they use registered.
• Dialogue — dialogue trees, checked for dead ends and unreachable nodes.
• Carriers — barks, environmental storytelling, cutscene scripts, weighted by how you said this game actually tells its story.

You can stop after any of them. Nothing is wasted: everything already generated stays where it is, in files you can read.

6 · Read the validation, then fix what matters

The L1 validation panel runs continuously. It checks that references resolve, shapes are legal and pacing holds — the mechanical things. Matters of taste are not its job. A green panel means nothing is broken; it does not mean the writing is good. That judgement stays yours, which is why the next step exists.

7 · Edit, and ink what you want kept

Anything the model drafted is pencil. Edit a field and it becomes ink — hand-written. Lock it and it is inked: no later generation, revision or dirty-propagation pass will overwrite it.

Use this early and often. It is the mechanism that makes iterating safe.

See Pencil, ink, inked for what happens at the boundaries.

8 · Change something and let it propagate

Change a mechanic. The dependency graph knows which artifacts declared a dependency on it, and only those are marked dirty and regenerated. Regeneration is half price, on purpose: a tool you flinch at using has lost the part that was worth paying for.

9 · Export

Two things come out of the Export page:

• Yarn Spinner files and a string table — dialogue trees as .yarn, with stable string IDs in a csv and json. See Getting it into Unity.
• The whole project as a git repository — with the complete history: every generation, every edit, every approval as a commit. One git clone and it is your own repo.

Export is never blocked by your balance. Running out of points pauses new generation and nothing else — you can always browse, edit, diff and take everything you have made.

What it costs

New accounts get a trial allowance, which covers roughly the first four steps above on a real idea of your own. See How points work for the arithmetic, and the pricing page for the numbers.