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 :)
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.