Credits:
https://www.wired.com/2023/08/geeks-guide-gamebooks/#:~:text=Ian%20Livingstone%20is%20the%20cofounder,recounts%20the%20company's%20humble%20beginnings.

Today I found out dark souls 3 is inspired by fighting fantasy
Ian Livingstone, author of FF have produced a new book Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop.

Daeun: Man, he looks old.
(Calling myself foxrain4 in a place full of furries sounds weird.)

Daeun's childhood games are all self-crafted games like using pen and paper, but of course before he does so, other students were already doing such games too in classroom. So most possibly, Daeun picked up the art of self-entertainment by imitating others. But not so faraway in the future, the computer games become wildly popular across the world like pokemon, ragnarok online and harvest moon. As you might have known, these games requires expensive gadgets like a gameboy or a pc, none of which Daeun have.

So, Daeun started drawing main player - a swordsman and all kinds of enemies like clock monster, werewolves and lizardmen. And also npcs that do not makes sense a volcano monster, time traveller on skateboard and bounty shop owner that gives you gold if you kill someone, because looting 100 gold on monster corpses does not makes sense at that point of time as monster do not trade.

Eventually, I got the money (Parents' money) to buy stuffs, and of course, it was not enough for a pc and such. This is why fighting fantasy were such a good pick at that point of time, cheap to enter and easy to learn. Ironically from the link article, my favourite game book is The Warlock of Firetop Mountain because it is easy, which the article states that it is difficult. And when I grew up to enter higher education which requires a laptop, I finally got addicted into computer games, none of which carried me far in school or real life.

But during compulsory army days is was when I realized school grades and friends might not matter as much I thought. What are school grades if you do not want to work hard at a real life job? What are friends when they disappear from the first sight of hard task? And, cough, cough, I was back into the computer games addiction again. The rise of computer videos games gave birth to epic games like Dark Souls 3, WOW and Street fighter. Which is really sad, because my school grades was not enough to enter an university that teaches how to make computer games. Which really brings us back to, does school grades and real life really not matters?

“Hidetaka Miyazaki, the designer of Dark Souls, credits Fighting Fantasy with inspiring him as a kid to want to become a game designer,” Livingstone says.

That is very interesting because dark souls 3 makes me feel like creating my own pc game, and I did using Quest from textadventures.co.uk There is this certain loop of inspiration that draws everyone in. Even though FF and DS3 are a dark world with terrible enemies, as a game creator, I find it easier to create content in that theme, how am I supposed to make a game where everyone is friends and nothing bad is happening? By the way, my favourite of dark souls series games is Bloodborne because it is easy.

Ian Livingstone have complimented video games for being helpful in brain improvement, but I find that what it does to me, is actually made me a little happier person, able to find my ground and walk through life without following sheeps whom follows other sheeps whom follows other sheeps, going to nowhere.

But of course, trouble reins in, making a text based game similar to an rpg game like Dark souls 3 or adventure quest is a pretty tall task, and even after 5 years of making quest games, I was still not anywhere close to the game I want to make. And eventually, I played many other quest game creators' games, and as expected, they are more story based than mine. An idea popped out, that maybe I was pushing myself too hard and forgetting the easy way; I can just make a story based game. And it worked! So guys, there is really no need to put strength, stamina, luck from FF into your quest games, there is really no need to put pictures like DS3 into your quest games, there is really no need to learn all the functions and coding to make a quest game.

The best function for a gamebook that I would recommend is an inventory tracker so your players do not have to use pen and paper to write down their loots.

Copy the following code as function and name it inventory: (To copy and paste code, click </> or code view button.)

firsttime {
  player.inventory = ""
  player.claim = ""
}
if (player.claim <> "0") {
  player.inventory = player.inventory+" "+player.claim
}
msg ("Inventory: "+player.inventory)
msg ("")

And during pages where your players receive loots, simply change the page type to script + text, and insert the following code. You can replace Firearms with any loot name that you want.

player.claim = "Firearms"

At game object, script when entering page, this code simply calls the function.

firsttime {
  game.inventory = "on"
}
if (game.inventory="on") {
  inventory
  player.claim = "0"
}

On pages with long story when you want to hide the inventory, write the code on previous page.

game.inventory = "off"

And remember to turn it back on afterwards

game.inventory = "on"

If you have an adventure that can goes back to the same pages, use the only if first time loot

firsttime {
  player.claim = "Firearms"
}