We made Jaron an adventure game for his birthday! The family got to be part of the adventure, which made it much more fun than sending him off to rescue a collection of strangers.
I built this one with RPG Maker XP. It supplies the tile maps, battles, and Ruby/RGSS runtime, so the project is mostly about putting the maps, characters, and events together into Jaron’s own quest. The game folder has the XP-style .rxdata files and a Game.ini pointing at RGSS104E.dll, rather than an HTML page full of JavaScript.
It needs the RPG Maker XP runtime to run. Getting the game installed is almost a little quest before the actual quest! This is a different kind of programming project from writing a game loop from scratch, but it is a really nice way to make a whole adventure as a present. Happy birthday, Jaron!