Text adventure template
Three rooms, two objects, and a puzzle you solve by typing a verb you have already seen work. Zork (Infocom, 1980) is the parser that must admit when it does not understand. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984) is that honesty as a joke. A single secret phrase is a lock with no key. Story to game is the closest page. It will not invent the parser's failures for you, and those failures are the design.
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What makes a text adventure
Text adventure: you type commands and the game describes what happens.
The games that set the standard are Zork (Infocom, 1980), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom, 1984) and A Dark Room (Doublespeak Games, 2013).
What the template starts with
The text adventure template starts with three rooms, two objects and one puzzle solved by typing. That is the smallest version of the loop that defines the genre: read, type a command, read the result.
What to change first
Type the right verb wrong, and the wrong verb right. Both replies should tell the truth about what the game understood. "I don't know that word" is a better failure than silence.
2D or 3D
The text adventure template starts in 2D.
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