I made a horrible mistake with my first game

I made a horrible mistake with my first game

So for context: I'm a programmer and I like the idea of not using a game engine, but I have no real prior experience with game development specifically.

I thought it was a good idea to make a text adventure game (think Zork) in C, since the language offers great portability, including the ability to run code on the 6502. Also a text adventure game made sense because I can't make art and idk anyone else who wanted to work on a game with me.

This was a terrible idea for a few reasons:

1. A text adventure game is impossible to make with a small scope
2. My from-scratch engine wasn't really designed with modifying the game data mid-development in mind
3. I have no clue what I'm doing.

I just don't know what to do now. Any ideas? @gamedev