Having messed with RPG Maker formats recently, I find this fascinating because it's so much more elegant and nicer looking.
Though it seems like it's more suited to fully text based scripts. The format I was messing with was full of markers to e.g. change the facial expression of the speaker's portrait, play sound effects, etc. (mid dialogue!)
Makes me think about how script/dialogues are written and formatted internally in other mediums. Umamusume in particular stands out in my mind; it has a lot of movement and actions as the dialogue lines are spoken. Sounds silly but they really do make it feel more dynamic and alive.
Inform 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.
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!
To paraphrase a description of inform 7 I once heard in a podcast -
Inform 7 awkwardly pretends to be regular English, similar to how text adventures awkwardly pretend that the player has meaningful freedom to act in the game.
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'm wondering why Ren'Py is never mentioned here at all. Judging from that comparison it seems to be much more powerful than these alternatives. But maybe I'm misunderstanding what these tools are actually for.
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.
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.
Very interesting to use Haxe for the core interpreter. I compile my own language into a string of tokens that can be interpreted by a simple stack-based VM (which also enables compiling other languages like a sunset of Yarn Spinner), but in my system I need to create an interpreter myself for every language I want to target. Not difficult (the VM is trivial) but a chore. I need to look into how this works with Haxe, thanks for the link?
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.
I believe before the "name" attribute is set, the name in the dialog is "barista", but once it has a "name", it displays as that instead. Technically, no, the barista didn't have a name until that selection was chosen
Though it seems like it's more suited to fully text based scripts. The format I was messing with was full of markers to e.g. change the facial expression of the speaker's portrait, play sound effects, etc. (mid dialogue!)
Makes me think about how script/dialogues are written and formatted internally in other mediums. Umamusume in particular stands out in my mind; it has a lot of movement and actions as the dialogue lines are spoken. Sounds silly but they really do make it feel more dynamic and alive.
https://github.com/I7-Examples/Bronze/blob/main/Bronze.infor...
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.
Inform 7 awkwardly pretends to be regular English, similar to how text adventures awkwardly pretend that the player has meaningful freedom to act in the game.
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.
Think it's a great fit for IF alright.
[0]: https://lore.org [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571081
https://www.choiceofgames.com/make-your-own-games/choicescri...
Long time ago I build my own interactive story system, but it was more focused on visuals and portability
10% The post
90% Epic Games' version control system