I entered the first three Adventuron game jams and, I must say, they are a lot of fun.
Adventuron is a full-blown programming language written exclusively for the creation of text adventures. The syntax is a little esoteric, but the editor has code hinting, auto completion, syntax colouring, dynamic error detection and most of the other niceties that you’d expect of a modern IDE. The editor runs in your web browser, so you can edit and run the game in an adjacent panel at the click of a button. The finished game is compiled to a single HTML page that runs in a browser. The reason for the somewhat restrictive graphics size in the game jam is so that it can also run on a mobile phone. Neat.
Adventuron is very easy to learn. I wrote my first full-blown adventure in less than a week (albeit only 7 rooms) with another week for the graphics. You can also have music or sound effects and custom fonts.
@adventuron has done a number of nice Adventuron tutorials to get you up to speed as quickly as possible. A lot of people entering the jams had never even done any programming before.
The games produced for the jams have ranged in quality from mediocre to excellent, but most of them have been very good and, most importantly, fun to play.
The good thing about entering a game jam is that it is a cooperative exercise. There’s a great community and everyone is very helpful and very friendly.
So if you’re thinking of having a go at parser-based interactive fiction or you just want to try something different, give Adventuron a go and enter the game jam. You won’t regret it.
If you want to see a sample of what you can do, feel free to check out my past game entries at itch.io. Just keep in mind that these have a retro feel in accordance with the spirit of the game jam rules. That doesn’t make them any less fun to play.