I had a bit of time to tinker yesterday. I'm not sure what made me think of the old Infocom text adventures but here we are.
If you're familiar with Text Adventures (or Interactive Fiction) you may know that one of—maybe the—most popular tool for creating them has been the Inform language. The current version is Inform 7 but waaaaay back when I was first learning, it is was Inform 6.
Anyway, I decided to throw together a quick little IF authoring API loosely based on Inform 6. It is by no means complete or particularly advanced. Basically, I followed the first tutorial for the game Heidi from The Inform Beginner's Guide and implemented just enough to make it work. But work it does! Mostly. I think...
The command parser is extremely simple so don't expect too much from it. All commands should be in the form:
Where the nouns are optional depending on what you're trying to do. So east or e to walk to the east; take object to pick up an object; and put object target to put an object on/in something else. There are enough verbs, including synonyms, to complete this game and the API even lets you add new ones but don't try to be too creative with your commands. It was mostly just something to do on a Saturday afternoon so I may or may not develop it further.
The API clocks in at 926 tokens while the example game itself is only 173.
For simplicity's sake here's the code for just the game itself if you're interested in how it works. You can find the original in Appendix B of The Inform Beginner's Guide linked above if you want to see how the two versions compare.