The key to making an online game or writing a gamebook is simplicity, but not the type of simplicity you might imagine.

What's crucial is not the simplicity of the mechanics of the game that the players never see or are perhaps not even aware of, but it's the simplicity of use to the player that is key to a successful game.

For example Fortnite is so amazingly complex in its coding the mind boggles that it was created. Albeit they had a team of thousands and a budget of hundreds of millions, which must help.

But crucially it's easy to access and more crucially, very easy to understand  and start playing. Nor are the rules terribly difficulty to understand. On a more basic level, look at cards games, something as basic as Snap, which small children can play using a regular deck of cards. The permutations are mathematically complex but the game is easy to set up and understand. See also checkers/draughts.

Regard of how complex the game may be, all successful games have a low threshold for the player to overcome. Nobody wants to wade through a seemingly endless rule book full of minor bylaws and codas. We want to set up and start playing as quickly as possible.

This is why with my online solo fantasy adventure, Game of Runes you simply click and play and the game takes care of all the necessary calculations for you, and I included only the bare minmum of backstory so everyone can get straight to playing as quickly as possible.

And when I converted Game of runes into a gamebook, I simplified the mechanics even further to speed up the players access to the game. Too many games and gamebooks want to show off how advanced  and how clever they are, but the fun in games is quick access, an easily to understand victory and maximum replayability.

Keep it simple and the players will love you for it.

http://tinyurl.com/GameOfRunes