Lantern

Lantern Text-adventure IDE

Lantern is a text-adventure authoring system/cross-compilier that lets you create Infocom-style adventure games and run them on many classic 8-bit computers, Raspberry Pi, or Windows. Lantern is a .NET application and will run on Windows, and Linux (using Mono or WINE).

Lantern can export games to Amstrad CPC64, Apple //e, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Z80 based CP/M machines, IBM PC/XT, TRS-80 1/3/4, Sharp MZ80A, and ZX Spectrum 48K. There is also a virtual machine based player for Windows and Linux.

Features
Ability to import maps from Trizbort and Trizbort.io
An easy to use GUI for creating the game
A built-in player for testing your games
A four-word parser with disambiguation
A simple 'C' like language for custom game logic
Drop-in code snippets to make programming easier
Lots of helpful video tutorials.
Support for graphics on ZX Spectrum and DOS
Text to speech support in Windows interpreter
Easy export to the target platform

That's so cool. What can't Lantern do?

Lantern is an 8-bit system. This imposes certain limits on the game size. There is a limit of 128 rooms/objects. Unlike Infocom's Z-Machine, this tool does not use a virtual machine with memory management (yet). This limits the maximum game size to the amount of contiguous RAM available in the target machine. For making smallish games (up to about 80 rooms/objects), though, it works really well.