Oh wow! You did this by hand? That requires dedication. You're right there are other ways -- but so near the deadline, you probably didn't have the time to try anything fancy. I'm glad you pushed it out there.
Here are some tips. If you want to make the player actually type out north, you could just say...
understand the command "n" as something new.
xyzzying is an action out of world. understand "xyzzy" as xyzzying. carry out xyzzying: say "Wrong magic word.";
I may mention a few ways to do what you did, programmatically, later. It feels like being mr know it all here but I think it might be legit instructive and enjoyable. One way I thought of was writing a python script. The other involves properties in Inform 7. It's a really interesting (to me) exercise but I don't want to dump weird code on you without a warning.