If you want to create an adventure game but your visual skills are lacking, I recommend looking into text adventures! There are great tools for making them these days:
- Inform 7 has annoying syntax but an amazing IDE;
- Inform 6 is somewhat object oriented, has a good Emacs mode and decades of tools;
- Dialog takes the evaluation model of Inform 7 and dresses it in sensible syntax but it is a bit niche so tools are lacking;
etc.
The Wise-Woman's Dog is one of the best adventures I played in 2025: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=bor8rmyfk7w9kgqs
Funny, I just started playing The Wise-Woman’s Dog yesterday—it really is excellent!
I’d also secondly endorse Dialog. It’s a really intuitive way to think about the game world as a whole without having to worry about Inform 7’s AppleScript-esque syntax. It’s also grown quite a bit since the community started their own fork: https://github.com/Dialog-IF/dialog
Inform 7 is actually kind of fun to write once you get the hang of it.
What's interesting though is, at least in my experience, LLMs are terrible at generating Inform 7 code specifically because it's so uncanny-valley-similar to English.
Personally I really enjoy the syntax of Inform 7, but tastes vary and I certainly understand not liking it.
TADS 3 is another option if you prefer a more object-oriented, ALGOL-ish syntax with equivalent power.
The IFComp has run for decades now. If you are interested in good adventures, running through the highly-rated games from over the years is a good idea.
The IFComp website is at https://ifcomp.org/