You may want to take another look at TADS. You can cut-and-paste a lot of
the code from Ditch Day Drifter and other games into your own, with some
modifications (and, of course, permission from the appropriate authors.)
There's also a hypercard stack that will do some of the basic stuff for
you--creating rooms and assigning descriptions. You can find it at
ftp.gmd.de; I think it's
/if-archive/programming/tads/utils/tads-template-0.9.sit.hqx
One other possiblity is to make a graphical adventure game with World
Builder, now in the public domain. I gather it's pretty easy to use--but
I've seen very, very, very few good games created with it, which makes me
think it has some serious limitations.
-Jacob