I am currently working on a terminal text game just to practice my skills (C). It will be story driven escape the mansion kind of game. Even though the game will be short I want it to support save files.

Since I am new to game programming I am not sure how should I handle save files. The game will be short yet players will be able to find a lot of objects. I was thinking about saving a structure into a .txt file OR saving lots of 1 and 0 into txt file. Where each line represents each item or progress.

Is there a better way or common way how to do it?