Neocities - Interactive CYOA Creator Tutorial (2024)

To help you through this tutorial, we will start completely from scratch and show you how to create an account, upload your CYOA, and get it working.

Limits¶

Before committing to Neocities it's important that you understand its limitations in case it is not the right use case for you. If what you require falls outside of these limits, consider becoming a Neocities Supporter, or choosing another host.

If you don't care, you can skip ahead here.

Neocities's limits for a Free account are as follows:

• 1 GB storage – Some CYOAs get as large as hundreds of megabytes if they aren't using external URLs

• 200 GB bandwidth – How much traffic can visit your site (i.e., how much all visitors can download, including image files)

  Note

  This is a soft limit. Temporary surges are fine, [Neocities] won't take your site down automatically, and [they're] very flexible.

• File Upload Type restrictions

  • You can only upload the following file types:

    • HTML (.html, .htm)
    • Image (.jpg, .png, .gif, .svg, .ico)
    • Markdown (.md, .markdown)
    • JavaScript (.js, .json, .geojson)
    • CSS (.css)
    • Text (.txt, .text, .csv, .tsv)
    • XML (.xml)
    • Web Fonts (.eot, .ttf, .woff, .woff2, .svg)
    Full list

    _{asc atom avif bin css csv dae eot epub geojson gif gltf gpg htm html ico jpeg jpg js json key kml knowl less manifest map markdown md mf mid midi mtl obj opml otf pdf pgp png rdf resolveHandle rss sass scss svg text tsv ttf txt webapp webmanifest webp woff woff2 xcf xml}

  • More information is available here: https://neocities.org/site_files/allowed_types

    See Also

    Resources - Interactive CYOA Creator TutorialProject Harahel Interactive – v0.7.13 - ArkaviteBasics - Interactive CYOA Creator TutorialInteractive CYOA Creator by MeanDelay

• Can only create a single website per account

  Note

  Creating multiple accounts isn't disallowed! Though it can be a pain to sign in and out

Using the Web¶

The easiest and most beginner-friendly way is to sign up and upload your site through Neocities in the browser.

First thing's first, navigate to the website: https://neocities.org/

You should see this screen:

Now sign up with your credentials, bearing in mind that your Username will be your subdomain. So if your username was "epicradcool", your site would be hosted at https://epicradcool.neocities.org/.

You will be asked to verify your email, make sure you do that.

Now you will come upon this page:

If you wanted to learn about HTML, feel free to peruse that tutorial. When you're done, come back to this page and continue where you left off.

Next, click Go to the Dashboard >>.

The Dashboard¶

The Dashboard is a place you will quickly become very familiar with. It is where you will edit, upload, and update the files containing your CYOA.

This is the Dashboard:

You are now in your root directory. This is the very top of your website. Any files you place in this folder is accessible by going to https://your-site.neocities.org/a_file.png.

As you can see from the image, you can create new files and folders by pressing the button. That's not what we're interested in; we're not looking to create files or folders (at least, not at this point in the tutorial), we're looking to upload our already created project.json.

Uploading your files¶

There are two ways you can upload from the browser:

1. Press the Upload button – This cannot handle uploading files AND folders
2. Drag and drop the files in

Now we're going to upload our files. First, upload your project.json:

Next, upload the Viewer here. This is the code that actually interprets your project.json and displays it to players.

After that, you're done! View your CYOA live at the link at the top of your Dashboard. Easy, right?

Using the CLI¶

Please see the relevant information here: https://neocities.org/cli

Migrating from Neocities¶

At the bottom of the Dashboard there is a button entitled Download entire site. Use that to, well, download your site.