YarnDraft
v0.8.3 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.
That vocabulary is not borrowed from games, and neither is this board. Writing a book rather than building one, it works the same way — and exports as a manuscript instead of a game script: Word in the layout agents ask for, EPUB, Markdown, plain text or Fountain. Manuscript export →
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, no separate licence the day a project starts earning, nothing held back behind a tier.
set price = 0
Download for Windowsv0.8.3 — Beta · portable .zip · 8.3 MB
Windows only for now. macOS and Linux are on the list, under several other things.
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. That is not a virus warning — it is Windows noticing that nobody has paid for a certificate. 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.
Partly because the answers save you writing to us, and partly because search engines have a weakness for a page shaped like this one. No sense pretending otherwise.
Free today, and free in the ways that usually have an asterisk: no account, no seats, no per-project fee, nothing held back behind a tier.
Whether it is still free in three years is not something anyone can promise and mean it. Here is what can be promised: the copy you download is yours. It runs from the folder you put it in, it does not check in with anything, and nothing about it can be switched off from this end later.
Yes, including the work you sell. No royalty, no revenue threshold, no second licence that appears once a project starts earning.
Plenty of free tools are free right up until the moment your project makes money. This is not one of those, and it seemed worth saying out loud rather than leaving you to find out. The terms are in LICENSE.txt inside the download, not only on this page.
Yes, and more of it than the rest of this page suggests. The story board is acts, chapters, scenes and beats — that is a novel's structure, not a game's. Entities give you a character and location bible the whole project can point at, and the sketches are for maps and floor plans.
Write the prose into the scene cards and the board exports as a manuscript rather than as a game script: Word in the layout agents and publishers ask for, EPUB for beta readers, Markdown, plain text, or Fountain if it turns out to be a screenplay after all.
The game machinery is opt-in. Nothing obliges you to touch variables, conditions, inventories or an engine export, and the cards you do not need are simply not on your canvas.
What you do not get is a long-form editor. A scene is a text box, not a page. If you would rather draft in what you already write in and keep the structure here, that works too.
You can bet on it. It says Beta in the corner of the window, and that is not modesty.
If you find one, telling us is genuinely useful — most of what gets fixed got reported. Whether it is fixed this week depends on how bad it is and what else is on fire. That is a small project being honest, not a support policy.
No account, ever. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing hosted: a project is a folder of small JSON files on your own disk, and the app reads and writes them.
The optional parts — the AI assistant, cloud sync — need a connection, for reasons that will not surprise you. Everything else works with the network unplugged.
Windows, today, as a portable archive rather than an installer: unzip it anywhere, run it from there, delete the folder to uninstall.
macOS and Linux are not packaged yet. When they are, this answer changes; until then it says so.
Unreal Engine, today. You get a self-contained plugin — a C++ runtime, a Blueprint player, and your whole story as data the runtime can walk. It is MIT licensed, so whether you are allowed to ship it in a game you sell is not a question you have to go and ask.
Godot 4 is in progress: the export runs and the files are structurally sound, but its runtime has never been opened inside the Godot editor, so it is a preview rather than something to ship on. Unity is planned and not started.
Those two sentences are deliberately more specific than “coming soon”.
Yes, through whatever version control you already use. Every flow, entity, variable group and sketch is its own small file, written deterministically, so a diff shows what actually changed and a merge is an ordinary merge.
There is no server in the middle to disagree with, and no lock to wait for.
No, and that is deliberate. A project is JSON on your own disk — openable in any text editor, on a machine where this app was never installed.
There is a full project export on top of that, and the Unreal plugin hands your story to the engine as data rather than as something only YarnDraft can read. The honest test of a tool you are asked to trust is how cheap it is to leave.