Well the good news is I found a way to address building gargoyle, the bad news is that the test build of gnome-inform7 needs to be uninstalled to do that. Turns out building gargoyle helped me find a issue with gnome-inform7. I put instructions to remove it here and advise you take it off your system:
Here is a link to a deb I built for gargoyle, it looks like it works fine. I loaded a game up and text input etc was working. Note: this build has SDL disabled so no sound.