Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction
168 points - yesterday at 8:29 PM
SourceInform 7 will forever be the best language, not because it's a good language, but because of the way programmers react when you present them a page of Inform 7 code.
https://github.com/I7-Examples/Bronze/blob/main/Bronze.infor...
noufalibrahim
today at 8:05 AM
I wrote a few games using Inform 7 and ran a couple of workshops for it too.
It's not just the technical idiosyncrasies of the language. I've noticed that if you use it for the few hours and get into "the zone", you start to inhabit the world that you're creating and "see" it. The overall attitude is that of a world creator rather than a programmer fixing technical issues. Breaking the flow is trying to figure out how to handle an array or something like that. I liked the experience and this idea that the nature of the language will affect how you interact with it and hence the DX is, I think, not fully explored.
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 wonder if someone's tried IF tools like Inform 7 as the specification language you give an LLM agent. Looks like a good way to describe UI screens.
Would also work very well for "open prompts" interpreted and mapped to one of the available options by a LLM. As some sort of constraints.
yjftsjthsd-h
today at 6:36 AM
What do you mean, that's just a text file full of prose-
Oh.
Oh no.
(Seriously, that's either very clever and perfectly reasonable, or... Not. Haven't decided which. Guess someone had to follow COBOL's footsteps.)
Edit: Thought about it more, and I've decided that for the intended users that's excellent. In the same way I wish formal proof languages would just use alphanumeric reserved words like a normal programming language, meeting writers closer to home is probably a helpful step that need not have any real downsides assuming you document it well.
I am glad to have checked that one out. I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified.
so cool! how does this compare to ChoiceScript?
https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescri...
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.
queeshonda
yesterday at 11:07 PM
I thought these are tools for managing an Open source version control system designed for scalability?
bschmidt900
today at 1:49 AM
[dead]
What I missed in the docs: Is there some out of the box deploy target? Ink has a web export for example, so if that's all you need you don't need to deal with any middleware aspects and simply write your game, export for web and get the interface for free, basically.
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!
I like how readable the script is!
Long time ago I build my own interactive story system, but it was more focused on visuals and portability
I like how in the example gif, barista.name is set in the "Your name is Alex, right" block, implying that the barista didn't have a name/didn't know their name until after being prompted.
SpyCoder77
yesterday at 11:23 PM
Comments:
10% The post
90% Epic Games' version control system
kgwxd
yesterday at 10:21 PM
I know exactly how I'm going to version my .lor files!
I'm glad Epic didn't go with .lor extension
ncr100
yesterday at 10:29 PM
Lemmie guess - not git.
Not really related to the post, but does anyone else get a reflexive negative reaction to a .app TLD?