Many years ago (circa 1993) I ported the original Colossal Cave adventure by Crowther and Woods to TADS, a language created by Mike Roberts specifically for authoring text adventures. (Colossal Cave just came up recently here.)
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=c896g2rtsope497w
Graham Nelson ported my port to his Inform language, and Inform is probably your best choice if what you actually want to do is write a (plain text) adventure game.
If you want to learn C programming, writing a text adventure in C would be a fun learning project! But aside from pedagogy there’s no real reason to write a text adventure in anything other than Inform, TADS, etc. Not only is it much easier to use one of these purpose-built languages, with Inform you get multi-platform compatibility going back to the 8-bit era for free!
Personally if I had any free time, I’d be more interested in looking at how to use a frontier LLM like llama as an integral part of a text adventure. There was something like this using GPT-2 circulating on here a while back, but it was pretty rough.
However, it’s clear that if you figured out how to precisely control the LLM so it didn’t produce crazy stuff, you could realize the dream of truly realistic NPCs in these games. Text adventures would seem to be a perfect laboratory for experimenting with this.
https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=c896g2rtsope497w
Graham Nelson ported my port to his Inform language, and Inform is probably your best choice if what you actually want to do is write a (plain text) adventure game.
If you want to learn C programming, writing a text adventure in C would be a fun learning project! But aside from pedagogy there’s no real reason to write a text adventure in anything other than Inform, TADS, etc. Not only is it much easier to use one of these purpose-built languages, with Inform you get multi-platform compatibility going back to the 8-bit era for free!
Personally if I had any free time, I’d be more interested in looking at how to use a frontier LLM like llama as an integral part of a text adventure. There was something like this using GPT-2 circulating on here a while back, but it was pretty rough.
However, it’s clear that if you figured out how to precisely control the LLM so it didn’t produce crazy stuff, you could realize the dream of truly realistic NPCs in these games. Text adventures would seem to be a perfect laboratory for experimenting with this.