Who Made Scarlet Skips? Yerk Games Explained

Yerk Games

Scarlet Skips is developed and published by Yerk Games, credited on Steam as both developer and publisher — a self-published, independent release. The same name runs the Yerk YouTube channel, which posts under the handle YerkDiff.

The channel is not new. It has been publishing animated shorts since well before the game: Flash animated short films, a student film, character animation reels and, from 2018, shorts featuring a red-haired character named Scarlet. The animation work extends beyond their own projects too — Yerk directed cutscene animation for another indie game, Billie Bust Up.

Where Scarlet came from

Scarlet is not a character invented for this game. She appears in Yerk’s animation shorts years before Scarlet Skips was announced, which is why searches for her often surface animation clips rather than gameplay. She is voiced in the game by Brenna Thornton Espinosa, credited in the reveal trailer description.

The characters page covers who else people search for and why those names belong to other projects.

How the game got popular

The reveal trailer went up on 20 April 2026 and has since passed 600,000 views, which is far beyond the usual reach for an unannounced indie game. Coverage followed within days — Yahoo ran a piece asking what Scarlet Skips is and why it was going viral, and outlets including Niche Gamer covered the announcement.

By release day on 3 September 2026, the launch trailer cleared 240,000 views within about a day.

The AI-generated claim

A Steam forum thread titled ai slop detected argues the game was made with AI, and it had 26 replies at our last read. Yerk Games has not replied to that thread, so there is no official statement in either direction. Here is what can actually be checked:

• The YouTube channel has been posting hand-animated work since at least 2018, including a student film and traditional 2D animation, all predating current generative video tools.
• The character Scarlet exists in that earlier hand-animated work.
• The store page describes the animation method specifically: dozens of hand-made animations combined with logic-driven procedural movement using Unreal Engine’s animation tools.
• The game credits a named human voice actor.

None of that is a formal denial, because none has been issued. We report the argument and the checkable facts around it, and we will update this page if Yerk Games addresses it directly.

Contacting the developer

Yerk Games posts on YouTube and Twitter as YerkDiff and runs a Patreon. There is no official Discord listed on the Steam store page, and the Steam Community forum for the game is where players congregate — though the developer had not replied in any of the launch-week threads we read.