Enter a world of mystery, excitement, danger... Wait, no, that's the original game. Enter a world loosely based on that original world that is slightly dangerous, mostly mysterious, and maybe exciting.
Zork-ish is a text-based adventure game modeled after Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. While much a much smaller scale, the goal of the project was 2 fold. 1. Maintain a modular implementation such that expansion would be relatively simple for me or anyone else. 2. Create a parser that allowed for the computer to understand full sentences like the original game and in the process learn about natural language processing.
Zork is a computer game created by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling on an MIT mainframe. The original game was so massive for the time that it had to be split into 3 parts, the first of which was released in 1980 under the company name Infocom. It is a text-based adventure game in which the user explores and solves puzzles by typing sentences to describe the actions they wish to take, the computer interprets the input, and returns the results of their actions. The most remarkable aspect of Zork's programing is it's language parser. Zork allows the user to type complex and full sentences compared to the broken english usually required for text-based adventure games. Phrases like "get sword" or "use sword monster" can be elongated to "pick up the sword" or "swing the sword at the scary monster".
Zork-ish was coded using C++. Amazon Web Service combined with the GoTTY plugin was used to run the code online.