Did you ever play any classic text adventure games like Zork or Colossal Cave Adventure?

Ever since I starting coding, I’ve wondered how those developers built those games. How do you account for all the different phrases a player might try to say? My guess: back in the 80s and 90s they did it largely through long, exhaustive lists of potential phrases.

So in October when we launched Twilio Autopilot to beta I knew exactly what to build first: my very own text adventure game.

Turns out we only need about a dozen lines of JSON to pull it off. Ready? Let's get started.

What’s Twilio Autopilot?

Twilio Autopilot allows you to build intelligent bots using natural language understanding and machine learning.

It’s a perfect fit for a text adventure because we can define as few as ten phrases for an individual action (e.g. “open the ...