Update 6.5 - Whoops
I haven't actually got anything practical done in the last couple of days, because of a combination of life events and Bad Mood. It'll probably be a couple more days because I can get back to it, since more stuff is happening this weekend and I have other work that needs catching up on more urgently than this.
So uh, it's looking pretty unlikely I'll have a finished game to submit at the end of the jam. Sorry.
This might be a blessing in disguise. If I was keeping to the two week limit, there's one very important factor I wouldn't have been able to account for: testing. I think text parser-based interactive fiction is more vulnerable to developer oversights than most other types of puzzle or narrative-based game. Because most such interactive fictions simulate a space and a variety of actions, players expect to be able to play around. So this means a lot of reasonable actions need to be accounted for, with either an interesting result or a reasonable explanation for why they would be silly to try.*
This is especially important when you have a lot of objects in your game and players think of alternate possible solutions. For example, if I put a locked door in my game that needs to be picked with a hairpin, players will want to know why they can't use the credit card to jimmy the lock instead. The best way to find all of these different cases is with a good phase of testing.
I'll see this jam through to the end and keep working on the game, but if I don't submit, I'll take the time to refine this game a lot more before releasing it properly. I will say, though, that I did meet my other goal of learning my way around Inform 7. So this jam is at least a partial success for me!
* some games get around this by limiting the parser - that is, only letting the player use a small number of actions. This might seem less playful, but it makes the limits and rules of the game much clearer in terms of puzzle design, and it's easier for the author to account for alternative solutions and the like. I think Eat Me (cw: body horror, food) is the most famous example - you might remember a few games websites like Waypoint writing about it a couple of years ago - but also see The Wizard Sniffer and most if not all of Arthur DiBianca's recent games. (All of these are excellent games, by the way.) I'm considering something like this for my game, but I want to do some puzzle design work and see what feels right before I commit to this!