Welcome to Mortar 🦀

Hello and welcome to the world of Mortar!

What is Mortar?

Imagine you’re writing dialogue scripts for a game. You might encounter these frustrations:

Text cluttered with various technical markup, making it messy
Wanting to play sound effects when certain characters appear, but not knowing how to annotate
Writers and programmers constantly “stepping on each other’s toes”

Mortar was created to solve these problems.

It’s a language specifically designed for writing game dialogue, with the core principle of achieving strict separation between text content and event logic.

In essence, our philosophy is simple:

Let text be text, let code be code.

You can focus on writing stories, while the program focuses on handling game logic—the two don’t interfere with each other, yet work together perfectly.

What Can It Do?

Mortar is particularly suitable for these scenarios:

🎮 Game Dialogue Systems: RPG dialogues, visual novels
📖 Interactive Fiction: Text adventures, branching narratives
📚 Educational Content: Interactive tutorials, guided learning scenarios
🤖 Chat Scripts: Structured dialogue logic
🖼️ Multimedia Presentation: Synchronization of text and media events

Why Choose Mortar?

Compared to other dialogue systems, Mortar has these features:

Clean and Clear: No messy markup in the text
Precise Control: Can specify triggering events at specific character positions (like playing sound effects)
Easy to Understand: Syntax designed to feel as natural as everyday writing
Easy Integration: Compiles to JSON format, usable by any game engine

Quick Glance

This is what Mortar code looks like:

node OpeningScene {
    text: "Welcome to the magical world!"
    with events: [
        0, play_sound("magic_sound.wav")
        7, sparkle_effect()
    ]
    
    text: "Ready to start your adventure?"
    
    choice: [
        "Yes, I'm ready!" -> AdventureStart,
        "Let me think about it..." -> Hesitate
    ]
}

Looks intuitive, doesn’t it?

Next Steps

Want to try it right away? Check out Quick Start Guide
Need to install tools? Go to Installation
Want to learn more? Start with Core Concepts

Mortar is an open-source project, licensed under MIT/Apache-2.0 dual license ❤️