Sketches

The Sketches view is a freehand drawing surface for the rough thinking that does not fit into cards: a level layout, a room plan, a UI wireframe, an arrow scribbled over a floor plan. A sketch belongs to the project, so it is versioned and shared through Cloud sync just like the rest of your work.

Open it from the project tree in the left sidebar, under Sketches.

Drawing

Action	How
Draw	Left-click and drag, or draw with a pen tablet
Erase	Switch to the eraser, then drag across what you want gone
Pan	Middle mouse button (or the modifier set in Settings → Flow)
Zoom	Scroll wheel, or the toolbar buttons
Reset the view	The toolbar's reset button
Undo	Ctrl/Cmd + Z — one stroke, shape, move or erase sweep per press

Every tool has a shortcut: V select, P pen, E eraser, R rectangle, O ellipse, L line, A arrow, G polygon, T text.

Pick the stroke colour and width in the toolbar above the canvas. Until you choose a colour, the ink follows the theme — white on the dark canvas, black on the light one — so it is always visible against the background. Once you pick, your choice stays. Each stroke is committed when you lift the pen or release the mouse button, and each one is a separate undo step.

The eraser removes whole strokes rather than nibbling holes in them. While you drag, the strokes you are about to remove fade out, so you can see what will go before you commit; one sweep is one undo step, however many strokes it caught.

Shapes

For the straight parts of a layout there are rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow and polygon tools. The polygon draws a regular shape with the number of sides set in the toolbar — three for a triangle, six for a hexagon, up to twelve. Change the count with a polygon selected and it is redrawn with the new number of sides. Drag to draw; hold Shift while drawing a line or an arrow to lock it to the nearest 15°, which is how you get a cleanly horizontal, vertical or diagonal connection. Holding Shift while drawing a rectangle or an ellipse makes it a square or a circle. A line keeps the direction you drew it in, so an arrow's head lands on the end you finished at.

Stamps

The Stamp tool places a ready-made picture instead of drawing one: a mountain, a cave, a forest. Pick what to stamp with the three buttons next to the tool, then click the canvas to drop it at its default size, or drag to size it as you place it. Hold Shift while dragging to keep it square, so the artwork is not stretched.

The three sources differ in what the sketch remembers:

• A built-in symbol is the quickest start: a hundred and twenty of them, grouped into Plants, Terrain, Water, Settlements, Structures, Interiors, Gameplay, Modern, Sci-fi and Markers. Modern and Sci-fi cover the stories the rest of the set cannot — a skyscraper, a factory, a power pylon, a railway; a spaceship, a dome, an airlock, a droid. They are deliberately cooler than the others, because concrete and steel are, but they come from the same palette. The Gameplay group annotates a layout rather than furnishing it — where the player starts, where the level ends, an objective, a trigger zone, an NPC or a boss, a key and the lock it opens. The Interiors group covers what a level layout needs — doors, stairs up and down, ladders, pits, levers, pressure plates, furniture — drawn as objects rather than as architectural plan glyphs, so they sit on a sketch beside the outdoor ones. Most subjects come in more than one shape — a pine, a round tree, a dead tree and a palm all sit next to each other — so a map can keep whichever style suits it. These are drawn by the app, so they take the current ink colour, stroke width and fill exactly like a rectangle would, and they stay sharp at any zoom. The sketch stores only the symbol's name, so a forest of them costs almost nothing in the project file.
• An entity stamp points at the entity itself and draws its portrait. Rename the entity or give it a new icon and every sketch it appears on follows along.
• An image stamp points straight at the asset. This is the one to use when you already have artwork and would rather not create an entity for each drawing. A placed image keeps its proportions inside the box rather than stretching to fill it.

Line or colour

The symbol palette has a Line / Colour switch at the top. Both sets cover the same hundred and twenty subjects under the same names and the same categories — what differs is how they are drawn.

A line symbol is drawn by the app, so it takes the current ink colour, stroke width and fill, the same way a rectangle does. Use it when the sketch has a look of its own and the symbols should follow it.

A colour icon brings its own palette — a red roof, a green canopy, grey stone. In the Gameplay group the colour also carries meaning: green for where play begins, gold for what to aim at, red for what harms, blue for the machinery. The ink colour and stroke width do not apply to it, and neither does fill. It keeps its proportions inside its box rather than stretching, like an image stamp does. Use it when you want a map that reads at a glance without styling every symbol by hand.

Both kinds scatter, rotate, resize and take opacity, and both stay sharp at any zoom. Both also store only the symbol's name, so either way a forest costs almost nothing in the project file. Exported SVG and PNG files carry the colour icons embedded, so an export opens correctly on a machine that has never seen YarnDraft.

The symbol palette has a search box above the categories. It matches the names as they are shown in your language, so finding a windmill does not mean guessing what the app calls it internally.

Your own symbols

The symbol palette has an Import from SVG button. Pick an SVG you have added to Assets and its outlines become a symbol of your own, listed under the built-in ones. From then on it behaves exactly like a built-in: it takes the current ink colour, stroke width and fill, it scatters, and it stays sharp at any zoom.

This works on SVGs built from path elements — the usual shape of an icon or a line drawing. A photo, or a drawing made only of rectangles and circles, cannot be converted, and the app says so rather than importing something half-finished. Only the outlines are kept, so a multi-coloured illustration comes through as line art.

The outlines are stored once, on the asset itself, so stamping the same symbol a hundred times costs a hundred short lines in the project file, not a hundred copies of the drawing.

A stamp behaves like any other element once placed: select it, move it, resize it from its handles, change its opacity, reorder it, or erase it. An entity that has no icon yet — or one that has since been deleted — draws as a dashed outline rather than disappearing, so the layout keeps its shape while you sort the artwork out.

Scattering a row of them

A forest is not one tree placed forty times by hand. The Scatter tool takes the same stamp and lays it down along the path you drag — trees in a row, rocks along a ridge, crates down a corridor.

Three settings shape the result, and they sit next to the tool:

• Spacing is the gap between stamps, as a percentage of the stamp's size. The gap is measured along the path you drew, not per mouse event, so dragging slowly does not pile stamps on top of each other.
• Size jitter varies each stamp's size a little, so a row does not look stencilled.
• Rotation tilts each stamp by a random amount up to the angle you set.

Everything a single drag puts down is one step: one Ctrl+Z removes the whole row, not one tree at a time. Each stamp is still its own element afterwards, so you can nudge, resize or erase any of them individually.

A single drag places at most 500 stamps. Zoomed far out, a long drag would otherwise add thousands of elements to the file in one sweep.

Labels

The Text tool drops a label wherever you click. Type it, then finish by clicking somewhere else, pressing Enter, or picking another tool — all three keep what you typed. Escape backs out and leaves the label as it was.

Labels are drawn with a frame around them, sized to the text, so they stay readable over ink and reference images.

Clicking again with the text tool still in hand finishes the current label and starts a new one where you clicked, so you can drop several in a row. Clicking an existing label edits it, and so does double-clicking it with Select. A label left empty is discarded rather than sitting invisibly on the canvas.

Selecting and moving

Switch to Select. Click an element to pick it up, Shift-click to add or remove one, or drag on empty canvas to sweep a box around several. Drag a selected element to move the whole selection, and press Delete or Backspace to remove it. Escape clears the selection.

A selected item gets a box with eight handles; drag one to resize. Strokes, shapes and labels all scale together, and line weights and font sizes scale with them rather than staying stuck at their old size.

With something selected, the toolbar's colour, width, fill and opacity apply to it, not just to whatever you draw next.

Fill appears only when it has something to act on — while a rectangle or ellipse tool is in hand, or when the selection contains one — since lines, arrows and freehand strokes have no inside to fill. It starts at No fill, which is what you want for a floor plan drawn as outlines.

Opacity applies to whatever you draw next and to the current selection, which is how you knock a zone or an annotation back behind the linework.

Action	Shortcut
Copy	Ctrl/Cmd + C
Paste	Ctrl/Cmd + V
Duplicate in place	Ctrl/Cmd + D
Bring to front	Ctrl/Cmd + ]
Send to back	Ctrl/Cmd + [

Pasted and duplicated copies land slightly offset so they do not hide under the original.

Lines and arrows

A selected line or arrow gets a round handle at each end instead of the eight box handles. Drag one to move that end while the other stays put; hold Shift to snap the angle, the same way as while drawing. The box handles are no use here — a level line's bounding box is flat, so they would all sit on top of each other.

Position, size and alignment

With something selected, the panel on the right shows its X, Y, W and H for the selection as a whole. Type a number and press Enter to place or size it exactly — useful when a room has to be a specific width rather than roughly right.

Below the numbers are the align buttons: left, centre, right, top, middle and bottom. They align to the selection's own bounding box, not to the canvas, which has no fixed size. Two or more elements are needed for alignment to mean anything.

The last two buttons distribute the selection evenly, horizontally or vertically. The outermost two elements stay where they are and mark out the range; everything between them is spaced with an equal gap. That needs at least three elements.

Clicking selects along the ink itself rather than a bounding box, so a rectangle is picked up by its outline, not by the empty space inside it.

Layers

The panel on the right stacks the sketch in layers, listed top-first the way they sit on the canvas. Add a layer, rename it in place, drag its opacity slider, and use the arrows to restack it. Draw here marks the layer new strokes and shapes land on.

Each layer has two switches worth knowing apart:

• Hidden takes the layer off the canvas entirely.
• Locked leaves it visible but takes it out of reach — you cannot draw on it, select it, move it or erase it. That is how a traced-over reference stays put while you work on top of it.

Deleting a layer takes everything drawn on it too, and the last remaining layer cannot be deleted — there would be nowhere left to draw.

Exporting

Export SVG and Export PNG ask where to put the file and write it there. Add to Assets instead saves a PNG into the project's own Assets, where it can serve as a card image or an entity portrait and travels with the project through Cloud sync.

The export covers the drawn content with a small margin — not the current view — so it does not matter where you were panned or zoomed. Hidden layers are left out; locked ones are included, since locking only affects editing. Reference images are embedded in the file rather than linked, so the export stands on its own. The PNG is given a white background, because ink on a transparent page disappears in most viewers.

Linking a sketch to a card

Both flow cards and story cards can point at a sketch, so a level layout stays attached to the task or scene it belongs to.

On a flow card, the pencil button in the card's toolbar opens the sketch list; the button is highlighted once a sketch is linked. Reopening it offers Open sketch to jump there and Remove the link to detach it. A linked card also carries a small badge with the sketch's name next to its card type, so you can tell at a glance which cards have a sketch without selecting them one by one.

On a story card, pick one under Linked sketch in the card editor and use Open sketch to jump to it.

A link whose sketch has since been deleted simply stops offering to open it, rather than breaking the card.

Finding what links to a sketch

The Used by panel under the layer list works the other way round: it lists every flow card and story card that points at the sketch you are looking at, with the flow's name under each card. Clicking an entry opens that card — the flow canvas zooms to the node, and a story card opens in the outline with its parents expanded.

An empty list means nothing references the sketch, which is the quickest way to spot one that has come loose from the rest of the project.

The same link runs the other way for stamps: expand an entity in the Entities view and it lists the sketches it has been stamped on, with a count where it appears more than once. Clicking one opens that sketch. The list is only there when the entity is actually used.

Working with others

A sketch is one file per sketch under sketches/, so Cloud sync shows it by name in the change list rather than as a path. Strokes drawn on different branches merge together without a conflict.

If the same stroke really is edited on both sides, the conflict view describes it as a freehand stroke with its point count instead of printing thousands of coordinates.

Reference images

The picture button at the top of the layer panel drops an existing image from Assets onto the canvas as a tracing reference. It arrives on its own locked layer underneath everything else, so you can draw over it freely without nudging it. To move or replace it, unlock that layer first.

The sketch stores only a reference to the asset, not a copy of the picture. If the asset is later deleted, the sketch shows an empty dashed outline in its place rather than refusing to open.

Alignment guides

While you drag an element or draw a shape, YarnDraft looks for edges and centres that line up with what is already on the canvas. When one comes close it snaps onto it and draws a pink guide between the two, so rooms end up flush without fiddling.

Guides consider everything visible, locked layers included — a traced reference image is worth aligning to. Hidden layers are ignored, since they are not on screen to align with.

While drawing, only the corner under the cursor snaps; the corner you started from stays put.

Snapping to a grid

Snap to grid is on to begin with: the canvas shows a 16-unit grid, and shapes you draw, labels you place and elements you move land on it. Switch it off in the toolbar for a free-hand layout. It applies to placement only — freehand strokes are never snapped, since that is the point of drawing them by hand.

Grid and guides work together: the grid places roughly, then a guide refines onto an exact alignment if one is within reach.

Pen tablets

If you draw with a pen, YarnDraft uses the pen's pressure to modulate stroke width: press harder for a thicker line. Mouse and trackpad input draws at a constant width instead of faking pressure.

While the pen is on the tablet, touch input is ignored, so resting your hand on the surface does not draw. Touch works normally again a moment after you lift the pen.

If your pen has an eraser tip, flipping it over erases without changing the selected tool. This depends on the operating system reporting the tip: it works on Windows, and is unavailable on macOS and Linux -- which is why the eraser is always reachable from the toolbar and with E as well.

Pressure depends on the operating system passing the pen's data through to the app. It works on Windows; on macOS it works with Apple Pencil and depends on the driver with a graphics tablet; on Linux it is frequently unavailable, and strokes fall back to a constant width.

How sketches are stored

Each sketch is a separate file under sketches/ in the project folder, and every stroke is a single line of that file. That keeps the history readable and lets two people draw on the same sketch on different branches — Cloud sync merges their strokes together instead of reporting a conflict.