Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it.

We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful way to transact in foreign currencies, and pay for things when we’re travelling for work.

In early-April 2025, Wise asked us to provide some additional information on our Ultimate Beneficial Owners (UBOs) by uploading a statement of shareholders, and the ID of the owners. Perfectly reasonable stuff for an entity that pretends to be a bank to ask for.

You’ve been begging for it, and here it is! Announcing an exciting new product from Yarn Spinner…

🪐 Mass Effect 2 Save Importer for Yarn Spinner 🚀

Access everything about everything that players have done in the most important game of all time, straight from Yarn.

Eleanor arranged her storybooks on the small wooden table, her arthritic fingers tracing the worn covers she’d carried to the local library every Wednesday for twenty-three years. The familiar room felt much colder today.

“We’re starting with ‘The Cloud Sailor’ since it’s Amy’s birthday,” she announced to the gathered children. Some weren’t listening, which was normal, but many were also staring at the gleaming white booth being installed in her corner.

I get it. I disagree with it, but I get it. The tech industry is throwing obscene amounts of money at LLMs. VCs are salivating over AI startups. The big important executives are regularly bleating about how “we should integrate ChatGPT into our game” because they read some Medium article about the future of interactive entertainment.

But as narrative designers, we need to call this what it is: a massive distraction from what makes game characters work.

The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work

“But AI will get better at writing stories, won’t it?” This response to my rant about AI-generated content misses the point entirely. Even if AI writing improved dramatically tomorrow, fundamental problems would remain that no algorithm refinement can fix.

The environmental cost alone should give us pause. Training even a small LLM produces carbon emissions equivalent to the output of several cars, over their entire lifetimes, and each query consumes significant energy. Game development already has a substantial carbon footprint—why increase it when human writers remain perfectly capable?

“Are you going to add AI writing to Yarn Spinner?” It’s a question I hear almost weekly these days. Whether at game development conferences, online, or during meetings, there’s an assumption that every tool is racing to implement some form of generative AI. I understand the curiosity—we’re living through an unprecedented wave of AI hype, and there’s genuine confusion about where these technologies might fit into creative processes. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on why we’re taking a different path.

Some new links! Huzzah!

• “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study”
• Blogging in the age of ‘AI’
• SQL Injection Court (also worth reading this vaguely similar story about 32 million emails)

More soon!

So it didn’t end up being weekly. Here’s some links!

• Duh: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees
• Torment nexus is going well: “A significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities”
• Who would have guessed? AI code generation leads to more code, more duplicated code, less cohesive systems, more defects
• Residential networking over telephone

More next ‘week’!

We’re thrilled to announce that Jon, from the Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner team will be presenting a talk at the GDC this year in San Francisco: ‘DREDGE’ and Yarn Spinner: Building Narrative with Open Source.

The talk will explore how the indie hit, DREDGE, uses our Yarn Spinner technology for narrative, and how you can do the same.

Join us at GDC! Email me via paris AT yarnspinner.dev if you’d like to organise a meeting, too.

Today, I got back from the South Australian Game Exhibition 2025 (SAGE). It was an expo and mini-conference with a showcase, and an awards night, run by the South Australian Film Corporation and the South Australian Games Association, respecively. This was the first time at this fantastic weekend of events for me, and I have to say: I will definitely be back.

The South Australian games industry is doing really well. Their events were happy, healthy, passionate, and have a nice community feel that’s often lacking from games industry events as they try and professionalise and grow. It was wonderful to see how much camaraderie there is in South Australia. There were also some fantastic games on display, and many of them were hilarious.

Update: This event is now passed, and it went great!

I’m incredibly excited to be speaking at the upcoming TasICT event in Hobart, alongside the fabulous Procreate, Handbuilt Creative, and Screen Tasmania. I’ll be representing Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner, and no doubt Tas Game Makers, our Tasmanian Games Incubator, and other things will get a look in as well.

If you’re in Hobart, get along to the event to show your suport for the connection between Tasmania’s technology industry and creative technology industry!

We just had AGM for Tasmanian Game Makers, Inc. (TasGM), and for the third year in a row I was pleasantly surprised to be elected President. I’m really looking forward to working with the new committee to continue pushing the video game industry in Tasmania along, get the Tasmanian Games Incubator going as part of TasGM, and helping Screen Tasmania run Level Up.

With thanks to our outgoing board member, and our fantastic community and financial members.

I’m thrilled to share that we’ll be part of Level Up Tasmania 2024, a fantastic celebration of our local game development industry. This event, running from September 27-29, 2024, showcases the creativity and innovation thriving right here in Tasmania.

The main showcase will unfold at PW1 in Hobart on Friday and Saturday, featuring over 30 Tasmanian-made games. It’s a rare opportunity to see the breadth of talent we have in our state, all under one roof! Come along? Tickets are free and available now.

Another set of links I found interesting:

• So cool: Voyager 1 Team Accomplishes Tricky Thruster Swap
• Great Barrier Reef already been dealt its death blow
• The benefits of special interests in autism
• How I Built an NFC Movie Library for my Kids
• PIXHELL Attack: Leaking Sensitive Information from Air-Gap Computers via ‘Singing Pixels’

Thanks for reading!

It’s been a busy week! Here are some interesting links:

• How the Oldest Company in the World Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
• How does banking work?
• Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch
• Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail
• An unverified source, but it all sounds like it makes sense. How horrible: Buy, Borrow, Die - Explained

See you next time!

The West Coast Space Show was a fantastic success! We had a great time presenting our space-themed show and activities for kids and adults alike, all around Tasmania’s West and Central Coast.

We’re so grateful for the support we received from the Australian Government via National Science Week. We ran the show all over the West Coast and Central Coast of Tasmania, including amazing places like Strahan, Zeehan, Queenstown, and Ulverstone. In total, we spoke to more than 255 people.

Here are this week’s interesting links:

• Dishwashers are critical: At the heart of every restaurant
• Hahahah, oh ho ho ho, hahahaha: Microsoft’s Copilot falsely accuses court reporter of crimes he covered
• Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

Enjoy!

Here’s the latest links. I was travelling the last two weeks, so I missed a week, and this one is late, but here we are:

• The staggering death toll of scientific lies
• Finally, yes please: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
• From the ‘absolute crap’ department: Peloton announces $95 “used equipment activation fee”
• Magic moment: Sydney aquarium filled with song after sea birds mourn death of gay penguin Sphen
• You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.
• Did you lose your AirPods?
• Person having ordinary skill in the art
• 200 meteorites on Earth traced to 5 craters on Mars

See you soon!

And so it continues! Here’s my interesting links for this week:

• Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don’t Know What To Do About It
• New Euripides just dropped: Uncovered Euripides fragments are ‘kind of a big deal’
• Should’ve just used that Brother printer everyone has: Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
• From the “they quoted my clever wife” department: Space is becoming an ‘unsustainable environment in the long term,’ ESA says
• A public draft of the second edition of the brilliant Artificial Intelligence and Games book is available
• Computer Archeology: Exploring the Anatomy of an MS-DOS Virus (if you found this interesting you may also find this interesting)
• Last days of the lonely interstellar spacecraft (original here)

See you next week!

We’re so excited to announce that we’ll be presenting at the amazing GCAP conference in Melbourne, Australia, this year!

We’ll be showing off what we’ve been working on, and talking about how you can use Yarn Spinner to make your own games. We’ll also be around for the whole conference, so if you’re there, come and say hi!

With the death of Twitter, and the fracturing of social media, I’m going to try an experiment! To that end, I’m going post some of the more interesting things I’ve read online each Thursday. I hope you find them interesting too. Or not, I don’t mind. I’m just going to keep doing it anyway.

I’ll post links in no particular order, and they might not be recent. Just things I’ve found interesting in the previous week or so.

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that, together with my wife Mars, I’ll be heading to the West and North West coasts of Tasmania to present a series of space-themed events and workshops for kids and adults alike.

We’ve called these events the West Coast Space Show. This National Science Week project is supported by the Australian Government.

This is an early step in our efforts to establish the West Coast Space Centre. You can follow our work on the web, and on Instagram.

Phew, it’s been a week. Last week, I travelled all the way to Rochester, New York, to attend the NarraScope 2024 conference at The Strong National Museum of Play. I $ for three days of inspiration, connection, and storytelling innovation… and it was awesome!

The conference kicked off with a captivating keynote from Nat Clayton, fresh from their work on Inkle’s “A Highland Song.” Their talk on spatial storytelling and level design perfectly set the tone for a conference exploring the intersection of narrative and interactivity. It really was a banger. (Update: You can watch it now!)

You already know that Yarn Spinner is one of the most powerful, flexible and innovative tools for writing interactive stories. Yarn Spinner makes it easy to write stories that run in any engine, on any platform. However, there’s one platform that we’ve neglected:

The printed page.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Yarn Spinner for Books. Yarn Spinner for Books allows writers to write their stories in the Yarn syntax that they know and love, and produce beautifully-typeset PDFs with their interactive stories.

Yarn Spinner is now available for purchase! We’ve been working hard to make it easier for you to get started with Yarn Spinner, and we’re excited to announce that you can now buy Yarn Spinner on the Unity Asset Store, and the Itch Store.

Yarn Spinner will always be free and open source, but we’re excited to offer a way for you to support the project and get some extra features and support in return.

We’re thrilled to announce that our next game, I Feel Fine, is coming out this year! I Feel Fine is developed by studio, Secret Lab, written by Eisner Award-winning writer Ryan North, powered by Yarn Spinner, and funded by Screen Tasmania:

Great news! You’ll be dead in three days.

Here’s the situation. You’re a tourism information robot aboard a space station orbiting Jupiter. An asteroid will hit the station in three days, destroying it and everything on it. And you’re bolted to the floor.

Another new book! Our latest book, written together with my wife Mars, plus friends Tim and Jon, is out! It covers everything you need to know to do simulations using Unity ML-Agents, and how to use them to train machine learning models.

You can buy it from all sorts of book shops, as well as read it on O’Reilly’s Online Learning platform.

You can learn about all the other books I’ve written over the (many) years here.

It’s finally done! My latest book, written together with my Jon, is out! It’s a fantastic, visual beginners guide to Swift programming, with an emphasis on using Swift Playgrounds. I’m really proud of it.

You can buy it from all sorts of book shops, as well as read it on O’Reilly’s Online Learning platform.

We’re thrilled to announce that Night in the Woods, a game we’ve been working on for some time, is now also out for iOS. You can grab it today on the iOS App Store.

Go do crimes.

Our latest book, written together with my partner Mars, plus friends Tim and Jon, is out! It covers everything you need to know to do practical AI with Swift (hence its title: Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift, clever right?).

You can buy it from all sorts of book shops, as well as read it on O’Reilly’s Online Learning platform.