I can recommend the book "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7" - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creating-Interactive-Fiction-Inform-... - it walks through the process of creating a quite complex game and has some useful recipes and examples.

I've been playing around with this in recent months and while it does work, it's a pretty deep language with lots of quirks (kind of like English, actually...)

I recommend anyone who is interested in language design having a look at it, as it is a unique and interesting variation on domain-specific languages that sacrifices scalability and performance in favour of a certain kind of accessibility and power.

I've been using Aaron Reed's "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7" as a guide, which is as much about the nature of IF storytelling as the language (which is well-documented in the standard IDE): http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Interactive-Fiction-Inform-7/...