jeremyfa

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

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!