YarnDraft
v0.8.1 BETA
Speaker YarnDraft
A desktop workshop for writers and game designers: dialogue trees, quest logic, a story board and level sketches — all in plain files you can open, diff and merge. Free to download.
Instruction
set price = 0
Free to download, free to use, and free of a per-project fee.
Condition
if os == windows
A portable Windows build. Unzip it anywhere and run it — there is no installer.
Output pin
./your-project/
Every project is a folder of small JSON files on your own disk. Nothing is hosted.
Not boxes with text in them. A condition really reads a variable, a puzzle really has three exits, a task really keeps its own state.
Dialogue
Speaker, text, voice-over file, branches.
Condition
Reads a variable, a task or a clue. True and false leave on their own pins.
Instruction
Sets a variable as the player passes through.
Task
Active, done, failed — with its own canvas inside.
Clue
A condition can ask for it three scenes later.
Puzzle
Solved, failed and locked are three separate exits.
Inventory
The key changes hands on the line where it is said.
Timer / delay
Waits — or runs out, which is an exit of its own.
Game event
Hands your build something to do.
Audio
Sound or music, attached where it belongs.
Hub / jump
Or a jump to somewhere else entirely.
Flow
The scene lives on its own canvas. Breadcrumbs walk you back out.
+ output pins, and sticky notes for the parts that are still an argument. Every card in the manual →
Acts, chapters, scenes and beats on one board. Drag a beat and the outline reorders itself. A card can point at the flow that plays it, or at the sketch of the room it happens in — so the plan and the machine never drift apart.
act › chapter › scene › beat › idea
Pen, shapes, layers, grid and angle snapping, and real pressure from a drawing tablet. A hundred and twenty built-in symbols — pines, doors, spawn points, airlocks — in line or in colour. Scatter a row of trees along one drag. Export SVG or PNG, or link the sketch to the card that happens there.
one file per sketch · one stroke per line · sketching in the manual →
./East Wing Rescue/
project.json variables/story.variables.json templates/character_template.json entities/char_mara.json flows/arrival_dialogue.json sketches/east_wing.sketch.json assets/assets.json
One small file per flow, per entity, per variable group, per sketch — written deterministically, so a diff shows what changed and nothing else. Two writers on two branches merge without a fight.
Cloud sync is two buttons: save & upload, download latest. It speaks GitHub, GitLab and the rest, and your writers never see a command line.
It also notices when your project sits in a Dropbox or OneDrive folder,
and warns you before two machines fight over it. Cloud sync →
Optional, and off until you give it a key. Everything else on this page works without it.
Mara agrees too easily. Give her a reason to hold the key back.
She has no stake in the blackout yet. Add a clue about her brother on the night shift, gate the key behind CaretakerTrust ≥ 2, and give the refusal its own line.
proposes 3 cards and 2 edges on the canvas
The floating chat sees the whole graph and runs a structure check before it answers. Ask it to build a stretch of flow and it writes real cards and real edges. Generate characters and items straight from your own templates.
Your key, your model. With Ollama, nothing leaves the machine at all.
AI features →
Export to Unreal Engine and you get a self-contained plugin — a C++ runtime, a Blueprint player and your whole story as story.json — so the branching runs in-engine instead of sitting there as data you still have to interpret. Dialogue scripts go out as CSV, Markdown or JSON for voice actors and TTS batches, and come back in as a connected chain.
JSON · XML · CSV · Markdown · SVG · PNG · export →
A bundled MCP server lets Cursor, VS Code or Claude Code open the project the way you do: list the flows, add cards, wire them, write entities and variables, even draw a sketch.
add_dialogue_node · connect_nodes · MCP setup →
Engine, art, audio, the storefront's cut — an indie budget fills up on its own. This is not one of those lines. Download it, point it at a folder, and start writing: no account, no seats, no per-project fee, nothing held back behind a tier.
set price = 0
Download for Windowsv0.8.1 — Beta · portable .zip · 9.3 MB
Windows only for now — macOS and Linux are not packaged yet.
This is a portable package, not an installer. Download the archive, unzip it wherever you like, run the app from there. Nothing is written into Program Files, and uninstalling is deleting the folder.
It is not code-signed yet, so Windows stops the first launch. It is not a virus warning, and it does not come back after the first time.
SmartScreen shows a blue “Windows protected your PC” panel. Click More info, then Run anyway.
It is still beta, and it says so in the corner of the window. What it already does, it does on your disk, in files you can read.
New to it? The manual starts with a demo project — a small rescue scene, already wired, already sketched.