Previewing Lyre, a scripting language for quality-based narrative

A little under ten years ago (dear god) I tried, and eventually gave up on, building what I called at the time a "general-purpose QBN system". That is to say, a system for storylet narrative that could be used as narrative middleware or as a narrative scripting engine, like Ink or Yarn Spinner. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and I've come to this problem with a different perspective. I now think this is feasible. It's so feasible, in fact, that I've done it. What changed? Well... I spent four years working with Failbetter Games' StoryNexus system, which back in 2017 was already not available to the general public. I wrote that original article having just shipped Voyageur, of course, which is significantly inspired by StoryNexus; but between then and now I've written an order of magnitude more material intended for this kind of narrative, and I have a much clearer picture of the kinds of affordances I want. Yarn Spinner's model of storylet narrative (what it calls node…