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Hi everyone, here an old and avid reader of Cyoa. I am italian so I apologise for my not super perfect english.

I just want to say that I am gonna "devour" this website, but apart from this, I wanted to let you know that I wanted to create a story as well. I saw that you have a great amount of resource and many of you are very helpful. Guys, this place is a gold trove!

Apart from this, I wanted to ask a couple of question before actually creating a story.

I am a web designer, and I wanted to create the story in a web format, like using programming tools like React, and add visuals and graphics and many other interactive aspects to make the story more interesting because we are using the digital media and not just paper, but I saw that this website use a particular language of programming, so I am wondering... is there a way to publish even here something as a pure HTML page with some JS, or it is not allowed because of website restriction?

I understand that it is better to test it out writing some demo story, but before enter the rabbit hole, I wanted to ask you, if there is any reason for why the limitation to the pseudo programming used in here, instead of using basic HTML & JS knowledge.

Regardless, I hope to slowly be part to this community and be absolutely addicted to writing story.

It's possible to use javascript; I forget how. The code behind this site is a nightmare from the turn of the century that hasn't really changed, so I don't think it's a good fit to host an entire project written in React since you'll be doing all the work. If you want to though, feel free. This site has an "end game and leave comments" button at the end of forks that lets people exit the game with a rating and comment, so you'd have to allow both that and saving/loading a page. To keep those functions intact, you'd have to probably put the react script in global page scripts or wherever it can be persisted and work from there. In any case, it's a hassle.

As to why it uses a janky custom language? That was the real deal in 2001. Being highly flexible and rock-solid built wasn't a thing even in commercial web apps back then.

As far as completed games that do non standard things with the interface, so far there's Koi Koi, which if you click around a bit is a card game done with pure html. Then there's a poker game Cows vs Aliens done with a mix of site scripting and HTML. Delve is a roguelike.

I've seen other examples of demos that do some pretty advanced stuff, the editor is theoretically very flexible with the way it displays HTML, and yes javascript is doable by tying it in with the site scripting somehow too.

@BradinDvorak and @chumm might be the most knowledgeable about using JS, I'll go see if I can dig them up on Discord for you. (If you go to Brad's profile btw, there's a site extension that allows you to activate dark mode from your profile as well as some other features.)

You can, although as you have seen the site is in aspx and doesn't have a lot of computing power so you might have to try and optimize it and tweak things a little bit.

Especially regarding variables, like score etc.

I didn't try making a single page game but that is probably possible. 

You might be able to link other ressources from inside the site if you dont want to copy and paste your ressources at every page.

Somewhere in these forums there is the code for using JS and making an entire game in one page. I don't know where that is, though.

Well, all I'm gonna say is: Welcome to the site, and good effin' luck with the game.

Welcome to the site. As others have mentioned, you can use HTML all over the place and JS in some instances. If the others don't chime in, go ahead and experiment, it doesn't seem too likely you'll break anything.