What is Parser IF?
Interactive fiction is a form of storytelling where you play by typing commands in natural language. Instead of clicking buttons or selecting from menus, you type what you want to do:
go north take the brass lantern open the trapdoor put the jeweled egg in the trophy case
The game understands your words, figures out what you mean, and describes what happens next. It’s part puzzle game, part novel, part conversation with a world that reacts to everything you do.
Parser IF has a long history stretching back to the 1970s — Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, the Infocom catalog — but the form is very much alive. Modern authors continue to push it in new directions, from literary experiments to intricate puzzle worlds.
Why Sharpee?
Classic IF development …
What is Parser IF?
Interactive fiction is a form of storytelling where you play by typing commands in natural language. Instead of clicking buttons or selecting from menus, you type what you want to do:
go north take the brass lantern open the trapdoor put the jeweled egg in the trophy case
The game understands your words, figures out what you mean, and describes what happens next. It’s part puzzle game, part novel, part conversation with a world that reacts to everything you do.
Parser IF has a long history stretching back to the 1970s — Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork, the Infocom catalog — but the form is very much alive. Modern authors continue to push it in new directions, from literary experiments to intricate puzzle worlds.
Why Sharpee?
Classic IF development tools were built decades ago. They work, but they carry the weight of their era — custom languages, limited tooling, and architectures that resist modern development practices.
Sharpee takes a different approach. It’s built from the ground up in TypeScript, designed around composable traits, modern technical architecture, and a clean separation between game logic and natural language. Authors write in a real programming language with real tooling — type checking, IDE support, package management, testing frameworks.
The engine handles the hard parts: parsing natural language commands, managing a rich world model of objects and their relationships, coordinating complex multi-phase actions, and keeping NPCs acting autonomously. Authors focus on crafting their world and story.
Sharpee ships with standard actions, a full English parser and support for other language implementations, support for darkness and sensory restrictions, timed events, container logic, and everything else you’d expect from a mature IF platform. It runs in the browser and on the desktop via the Zifmia game runner.
It’s currently in beta, being battle-tested against one of the most complex text adventures ever made: a full port of Mainframe Zork’s Great Underground Empire with several new stories in the works by Sharpee’s creator, David Cornelson.