Now this is prime Hacker News content! Thank you. The idea of a narrative language is fascinating and I'll upvote anything that's using Haxe.
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
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 generals, but it's versatility is also what makes it hard to master I guess.
Seems pretty promising. The language looks clean which I can't say for some of the alternatives.
The thing that I find so challenging about these types of systems is scaling up the richness of the playback.
Very quickly I find I need to integrate animations, lip sync, vfx, timed event triggers... For that you really need some kind of timeline. Delays don't cut it. So then these clean text driven systems are at best an early step in a large process or abandoned for a more integrated solution.
But I really do long for the ability to import simple narrative scripts like this even in a full production system.
One of these days I'll try to build the high production value system in a way that keeps both the full, in editor, narrative graph and the simple narrative script files alive and synced.
Nice. Something short of the full lift that might be useful is to add a reflection API along with the playback API. That way implementing import/export of .lor files to an engine format becomes a lot more appealing. Something to think about, anyway.
This is very interesting - I’ve tried to make custom syntaxes for describing dialog etc multiple times, for embedding into game projects, especially since things like Ink aren’t really amenable to porting to other languages easily. So the multitarget/multi-language focus is very attractive.
One thing I will say though - I think something that would set a language/toolset like this apart, would be a high quality UI for showing how different parts flow into each other (a diagrammatic view as an essential / main view instead of just eg an addon).
I mostly say that out of jealousy after seeing the kinds of tooling that companies like eg Obsidian have for writing dialog and narratives
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.
There is an interesting parallel between the early web and the current AI ecosystem. In both cases, the winners are not the ones with the most advanced technology — they are the ones who solve the mundane infrastructure problems well.
Now this is prime Hacker News content! Thank you. The idea of a narrative language is fascinating and I'll upvote anything that's using Haxe.
I took Haxe for a spin years ago and was really impressed, just haven't been able to find the excuse to use it in my day to day work. I find the idea of cross-platform transpilation rather than compilation to be very interesting. Particularly when working with platforms like iOS where Apple can change the ground underneath your feet, being able to continue to use first-party tools while writing in the language of your choice is a valuable niche.
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 generals, but it's versatility is also what makes it hard to master I guess.
Seems pretty promising. The language looks clean which I can't say for some of the alternatives.
The thing that I find so challenging about these types of systems is scaling up the richness of the playback.
Very quickly I find I need to integrate animations, lip sync, vfx, timed event triggers... For that you really need some kind of timeline. Delays don't cut it. So then these clean text driven systems are at best an early step in a large process or abandoned for a more integrated solution.
But I really do long for the ability to import simple narrative scripts like this even in a full production system.
One of these days I'll try to build the high production value system in a way that keeps both the full, in editor, narrative graph and the simple narrative script files alive and synced.
I actually plan to tackle the "graph in sync with the narrative script files" in the future, just not the focus yet :)
Nice. Something short of the full lift that might be useful is to add a reflection API along with the playback API. That way implementing import/export of .lor files to an engine format becomes a lot more appealing. Something to think about, anyway.
For more specific use cases, you can already export a JSON representation of any .lor content (can be done at runtime).
This is very interesting - I’ve tried to make custom syntaxes for describing dialog etc multiple times, for embedding into game projects, especially since things like Ink aren’t really amenable to porting to other languages easily. So the multitarget/multi-language focus is very attractive.
One thing I will say though - I think something that would set a language/toolset like this apart, would be a high quality UI for showing how different parts flow into each other (a diagrammatic view as an essential / main view instead of just eg an addon).
I mostly say that out of jealousy after seeing the kinds of tooling that companies like eg Obsidian have for writing dialog and narratives
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!
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!
I'm familiar with Haxe through the game Dead Cells, which has absolutely exquisite controls/gameplay and graphics
I used Haxe a lot when OpenFL + HaxeFlixel were still more common. Haxe is a nice programming language.
Is the name a reference to Laureline from Valérian ?
Nope :D, as mentioned on the website, it's short for "lore" (story, worldbuilding) and "line" (writing, a line of dialogue)
There is an interesting parallel between the early web and the current AI ecosystem. In both cases, the winners are not the ones with the most advanced technology — they are the ones who solve the mundane infrastructure problems well.