🚀 Your First Project: From Blank Page to First Screen

Your account is created, the home page is empty, and there's that big "New project" button. This article holds your hand from that click all the way to the moment a sentence you wrote shows up in a real player. 🎬

The expected result: a tiny but complete application — it starts, it displays your sentence, it stops. Nothing more, and that's exactly the point: you'll have touched every one of Celestory's founding gestures at least once.

Time needed: about 10 minutes, two of them spent on a wall that almost everyone hits and nobody sees coming. We've put it in the right spot in this walkthrough, right before you fall into it.

🔺 No technical prerequisites. You won't write a single line of code, and you won't need any file, image or sound.

1️⃣ Creating the project

On the home page, click the New project card — its subtitle sets the tone: "Start a new blank project from scratch."

A window opens and asks you for four things, and four only:

Fill in the name, leave everything else as it is, click Create. The editor opens straight into your new project.

⚠️ You are not asked to pick a template. Despite Celestory having several templates, this window doesn't offer a choice of any: every new project is created as Chatbot, with no alternative available at this point. If you wanted a Visual Novel, that will be a module you add afterwards — not a checkbox here.

2️⃣ Taking stock: what Celestory just created for you

Take ten seconds to look at what's in front of you. It's worth it, because there's very little — and knowing exactly how little will save you a lot of confusion.

In the graph, there is exactly one block: a green rectangle named Start, sitting a little towards the top left of the workspace. That's it. No sample dialogue, no choice, no wire.

Backstage, there are already three menus (the blue project button, top left → Menus):

• a Main menu with a single Start button already wired to your module;
• a transparent HUD with a ⏸️ button;
• a Pause overlay menu, with Resume and Save and quit.

And there is nothing else: zero variables, zero characters, zero stages, zero content resources. Your Chatbot module's character list is literally empty.

🔺 This is the key to everything that follows: the menus are ready to launch a story, but the story itself is empty. A fresh project is a working shell wrapped around content that doesn't exist yet.

3️⃣ Placing your first block — and wiring it in the same move

This is where the difference between a smooth first session and twenty minutes of confusion gets decided. There are two ways to add a block; only one is recommended for your very first.

✨ The right method: pull a wire into empty space

Look at the right edge of the Start block: it carries a small hollow triangle. That triangle is its output.

1. Click that triangle and drag towards an empty area of the graph, to the right.
2. Release in empty space.
3. A "Connect to…" menu opens, with a search field.
4. Type alert and choose the Alert (in) entry.

The Alert block appears right where you released the mouse, and it's already wired to the Start block. One move, two problems solved.

🔺 Why Alert and not Dialogue? Because Alert only asks for one thing: text. The Dialogue block, on the other hand, starts by asking you "Choose your first character:" — and since your project doesn't have any yet, you'd have to create one first. An excellent second step, a bad first one.

⚠️ The "Most used blocks" menu lies a little. On a fresh project, this section is pre-filled with four blocks picked in advance — Alert, Assign, Choice, Condition — even though you haven't used anything yet. And Dialogue, which should logically be there, isn't: it sits further down, under Other blocks. Don't look for logic in this ranking until you've actually built something.

🔺 The other methods, and the trap that comes with them

You can also add a block via the Add block button in the top bar, or by right-clicking the graph → Add block.

• Right-clicking drops the block right where you clicked: clean, but the block arrives unwired.
• The top-bar button drops the block at the centre of the view… except as long as you haven't panned or zoomed the graph. On a freshly created project, that centre is still 0,0 — which is exactly the Start block's position.

⚠️ A block can sit exactly on top of another, pixel for pixel, with no warning at all. Celestory stacks blocks without ever checking whether they overlap. If you use the top-bar button as your very first move, your new block will land on top of the Start block, and you'll think nothing happened. The fix is simple: drag the top block aside to reveal the one underneath — or, better, use the wire-pulled-into-empty-space method.

🔎 While we're at it: triangles and circles

Two shapes coexist on the edges of blocks:

• triangles carry the story's flow (the order things happen in);
• circles carry values (a text, a number, an image).

And in both cases: hollow = nothing is plugged in, filled = something is plugged in. One glance is enough to tell whether your graph holds together. Remember this, we'll come back to it in step 6.

4️⃣ Writing your sentence

Double-click the Alert block.

⚠️ A single click only selects the block — it doesn't open it. This is beginners' number-one cause of "I can't edit my block." Double-click, always.

A floating window opens. It contains:

• right at the top, an "Add custom title…" field — this is the name the block will display on the graph. Optional, but very useful once your graph goes past five blocks;
• further down, one field per point on the block. The one you care about is called text.

🔺 Point names are translated into the interface language (in French, text becomes texte), except the two flow points in and out, which stay the same in every language.

Click inside the text field and write your sentence — for example:

Hello, and welcome to my very first Celestory experience.

It's a rich text editor: bold, lists and fonts are available in its toolbar. For this first try, plain text is more than enough.

Close the block window. The graph now shows two blocks connected by a wire. ✅

5️⃣ Saving — by hand, right now

⚠️ Celestory never saves on its own. There's no autosave, no periodic background save, and no warning if you close the tab. The browser will let you leave without a word, and everything you just did will vanish.

Two ways to save, and they do the same thing:

• the floppy-disk button in the top bar (its tooltip reads: "Save graph in the cloud.");
• the Cmd+S shortcut (Ctrl+S on Windows).

A "Saving project…" banner appears, then a green "Project saved" banner — that exact wording, hard-coded in English regardless of your interface language. Until you've seen that green banner, nothing is safe.

⚠️ The shortcut is ignored while your cursor is inside an input field (such as the Alert's text field): click on the graph first, then press Cmd+S.

🔺 Get into the habit of hitting Cmd+S after every change that cost you some effort. It's the only safety net there is.

6️⃣ Playing it

Click the Play current module button (▶ icon, top right of the bar). Its tooltip shows Shift+P, but that shortcut does nothing: click the button.

Two windows open:

• Play test — the player itself, a phone-shaped window (360 × 680 pixels, the default portrait format for any new project);
• Debug — a small panel on the right, with three tabs: General, Variables, Display.

Your sentence should appear in the player. 🎉 Then nothing else: that's normal, the Alert block's output isn't wired to anything further, so the story stops there. You've just built, start to finish, a working Celestory experience.

🔺 Two ways to play, not to be confused. Clicking the button directly launches "Play current module": it starts straight at the Start block and skips your menus entirely. If you hover the button without clicking, a small menu additionally offers "Open menu Main menu": that one shows your home screen, with its Start button, the way a real user will see it. Try both: they don't tell the same story.

🔺 Good news along the way: the player runs the current state of your editor, not the last saved version. So you don't need to save to test. You need to save so you don't lose what you're testing.

🧱 The wall: "I pressed Play and nothing happens"

This is the wall promised in the introduction, and it's almost inevitable if you added your block any other way than by pulling a wire into empty space.

The symptom. You click Play. The window opens, the default background shows up… and nothing else. No text, no button, no error message. If you went through the home menu, the Start button does respond — the screen just goes blank.

The cause. The Start block isn't wired to anything. Celestory knows where to begin, but has no idea what comes next, so it does nothing. A block placed without being wired is a dead block.

⚠️ And above all: no one will tell you. Celestory can detect three compile errors — no start block, several start blocks, an unrecognised block type — but these errors are shown in no interface at all. They only go out to the browser's technical console, which you have no reason to open. Silence is therefore not a sign that everything's fine: it's just silence.

The three-second diagnosis. Two reflexes, in this order:

1. Look at the triangles. On the right edge of the Start block, a hollow triangle means: nothing leaves from here. That's your answer.
2. Read the Debug window, General tab. It shows "Current block" with its ID and name. If it stubbornly keeps telling you the current block is start, playback never moved a single step. The "Center view on block" button even snaps the graph straight onto the culprit.

The fix. Drag a wire from the Start block's triangle to the input triangle (on the left) of your Alert block. Play again. Solved.

🔺 This wall is the first of a small family of failures that never announce themselves. Once your first screen works, the article "When nothing works, and nothing tells you why" catalogues the rest: stages that won't load, invisible lines, stories that freeze. Keep it handy, just not before you finish this one.

✅ The six-step recap

1. New project → a name → Create. (No template choice: it'll be a Chatbot.)
2. Notice there's one block, three menus, and nothing else.
3. Pull a wire from the Start block's triangle into empty space → Alert (in).
4. Double-click the Alert block → write your sentence in the text field.
5. Cmd+S → wait for the green banner.
6. Click Play current module → read your sentence on screen.

If a project ever refuses to start, work back up this list: nine times out of ten, the answer is at step 3.

→ Next step: you connected two blocks without really looking at what you were doing. The article Connecting Two Blocks: The Wire, the Triangles and the Circles explains what these shapes mean, what can plug into what, and why some wires get refused. 🔗

Updated on: 23/09/2026