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Title "Ctrl Alt Escape". https://www.amazon.es/Ctrl-Alt-Escape-Best-Seller/dp/8467582502 Now sold to Mexico and Chile. Hopefully English version sold soon. Interesting question. I am a tinkerer, love playing with and studying Tads, Inform 7 etc. Love to program and dream up ways of making even better parsers so other IF people will say "Wow, you are good".

But in the end, I found I was looking at complexity (I ENJOY complexity, but do my public enjoy it?) I love it when there are combat systems that simulate D&D style fights with statistics... but with all these random numbers you are designing a way of tossing a coin to answer the question "Does the player go the right way or the wrong way? do they die or survive?". I had a story to tell so I just decided to tell that very best version of the story rather than letting a player have the (entirely different, and equally valid fun) experience of trying to get it right and probably getting it wrong.

If I ever did write a full blown IF work, I'm sure I would have combat systems and statistics and maybe even visible statistics AND visible dice throws. And I would probably make the AI cheat so it gave the players the best experience. "You need an 18 or above, and you roll .... an 18, Wow you are lucky, just scraped a survive throw."

If you're okay with Traveller instead of D&D (so, like, Firefly-esque scifi) I highly recommend Superluminal Vagrant Twin.

Endless Nameless is cool but its' more of a... clever metacommentary on the genre.

Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom might be the closest thing to what you're looking for.

The Sorcery! series is fancier than most IF but it counts, I guess. The first one is your bog-standard old-school CYOA, second one opens up significantly, I haven't played the third one yet but I hear they made it pretty open-world.

Gamebook-wise, try Fabled Lands and DestinyQuest.

I'm working on doing the same thing to my stories in Inform 7. right now I'm working my way through the "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7" book my wife got me for Christmas, and once done with the sample game, will be retrofitting it into my fiction world.

I don't know about exporting it into a format that Steam could use. I'm planning to use the website export to put it on my site. There are lots of options to export the game along with an interpreter to run it.

I looked at Twine, but am just starting to learn coding. Inform uses a natural language approach- it uses a text parser to create code from natural language commands. It's a little wonky, but once you get the basics down, it's a lot of fun.

I think what your talking about is a systems focus. I just read a book on this topic, I think it summarizes quite well what your thinking about. It's called Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design. I definitely recommend checking it out, I found it very inspirational as a designer.

Gamebooks, perhaps? There are new both as printed books, e-books, and tablet/computer apps. Just thinking that might be a good way to start out with text-games, making an easier transition to games where you need to type in commands, even if that was not what you asked for.

The Virtual Reality gamebook series for instance was re-released just a few days ago, and the first book is free on kindle until today:
http://www.amazon.com/Down-Among-Critical-gamebooks-ebook/dp/B00FJ39R9S/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1381689276&sr=1-2&keywords=down+with+dead+men
... although I think that one might be for older kids...

The re-released Way of The Tiger books has a free intro online as well somewhere (probably linked from their kickstarter page?) but again I don't know what a 10 yo will think (I was probably 12-13 when I read/played my first Way of The Tiger book).

Your Amazon link on your home page is also malformed and has an extra "http" at the end. Here is the correct link: https://www.amazon.com/Aslan-Game-Studio-Interactive-Stories/dp/B06X1CB3BL

Best wishes with your project.