Over the weekend I explored writing Interactive Fiction games (ie things like Zork from Infocom) using Inform. Inform was/is basically the same technology that Zork was written in, and things written in it will run using the same emulators that will run the Zork games now.

The language itself reminds me of Pascal more then anything, and has been easy to pick up. More then anything, I believe the difficulty in learning a language (any language) is not the syntax as much as it is learning the libraries and the APIs that accompany the language. I guess you could say the same thing about spoken language as well....the vocab and conjugation is a bear, not "the where" of the placement of a noun or a verb.

Anyway, I was going through a tutorial and wrote the following game. I did add a couple of my own features that were not in the tutorial, but still have a long way to go before I write anything that is really exciting.

If you are interested, here is the data file for the "game" I "wrote."