HN user
Thanks for the really kind feedback!
About Loreline's future, yes, I have plans to keep maintaining it and improving it in the long run!
The free Loreline Writer app on Itch.io is "name your own price", so that's currently the easiest way to support the project. I may set up a crowdfunding page later.
Lua version should work as well as the others, but if you encounter any issue you can file it on Github.
Loreline isn't aimed at parser-based interactive fiction like Inform, it's a choice-based narrative scripting language, closer to Ink or Yarn Spinner. DM4 solves a different kind of problem.
Edit: that said, you're right this §24 is interesting regardless!
Because if you don't, the language can't rely on indentation to detect the structure, and you need more symbols and delimiters and... then it becomes Ink or Yarn Spinner :)
You're not the first one to mention it, but it's instead Lore (worldbuilding) + Line (dialogue) :)
And you can also bind custom functions to the language too, to play sounds, animations etc. Here's an example from the docs:
sarah: What's this green diamond? Wait, let me touch it... james: Nooo don't touch it!
playExplosion()
james: Sarah? Sarah!!
Loreline does have tags to address this. When you plug the language to an actual graphics/game engine, you can use them to change how you display things:
barista: <concerned> That's a lot of coffee...
<- use "concerned" tag in the engine to display a concerned face
I'd say it shares a lot of similarities given that both languages look indented and have similar keywords. The main differences are going to be the tooling, the portability, and the syntax itself where Loreline tries to avoid the use of symbols, favoring the semantic structure of the script instead and taking advantage of the indentation.
I don't know Inform 7 much, but I'm trying my best to make Loreline language syntax never get in the way of the writing and thinking process. Kept refining it since 2024 and this is still an ongoing process. I'm hoping that it will resonate to other writers too!
I'm glad Epic didn't go with .lor extension
Portability is actually a key element of Loreline, you can get more technical info about how it's addressed there: https://loreline.app/en/docs/technical-overview/
You can use the Loreline Writer app to export an HTML page right from the editor. It's pretty basic for now but it will get improved over time!
It’s closer to Ink or Yarn Spinner (or to some extent Twine). Loreline isn’t doing any user text parsing, but is pretty good to manage branching dialogues and choices.
It works on any fairly recent java runtime. Somebody is already using it with libGDX!
For more specific use cases, you can already export a JSON representation of any .lor content (can be done at runtime).
I actually plan to tackle the "graph in sync with the narrative script files" in the future, just not the focus yet :)
Haxe is such a great piece of tech, which becomes more and more powerful as you get to know it better. I wish it was more used by companies and developers in general, but it's versatility is also what makes it hard to master I guess.
I talk a bit about the roadmap there: https://loreline.app/en/journal/march-2026/, and yes, there are plans to make an actual app with UI that helps navigate and analyze the narrative content, it's just not the focus yet (better to have a solid language and runtimes to run it first). More should come on that subject during the year!
Nope :D, as mentioned on the website, it's short for "lore" (story, worldbuilding) and "line" (writing, a line of dialogue)
Hi, Loreline author here,
I linked to the technical overview of Loreline, a narrative language to write interactive fiction and dialogues in games, because it shows how Haxe can be used to create software that can run as a library on many other platforms.
You can try the language syntax directly here: https://loreline.app/en/playground/ And look at the code there: https://github.com/jeremyfa/loreline
Feel free to ask any question/feedback!
Examples on the website are more focused on things that can work directly in the browser, but Ceramic has been used to ship mobile games in production. Pointer events are working on both desktop and mobile platforms by default, with optional multitouch support on mobile if needed.
Standard library is not that bad. It makes sense that there are inherently differences between, say, JS/Web runtime and native/C++ system platforms. Haxe does provide relevant cross platform API when available: file system access, threading etc...
I created an open source 2D Game Engine in Haxe language and made it run inside Unity in order to extend its capabilities and support additional platforms like consoles. This post is a detailed technical overview of how it was achieved.