Catherine Raymond wrote:

I hit the button for "create character" and nothing happened; I only got a message saying "Loading".

I've seen this happen if there is a character with that name already in the game. Try picking a different character name and see if that helps...

(I'll report the fault with FB)

Dialogue is written as "Hello," he said or "Hello!" he said, never "Hello." He said or "Hello." he said or "Hello," He said or "Hello" he said. The only exception to this is if the next sentence doesn't contain a speech verb, in which case it's written as "Hello." He grinned, never "Hello," he grinned or "Hello," He grinned or "Hello." he grinned. Note that something isn't a speech verb just because it's a sound you make with your mouth, so generally stuff like laughed or giggled is in the second category. Furthermore, if you're breaking up two complete sentences it's "Hi," he said. "This is it." not "Hi," he said, "this is it." or "Hi," he said "this is it." And if you're breaking up a sentence in the middle, it's "Hi. This," he said, "is it." If there's no speech verb in the break, you use a dash, like "Hi. This - " He looked around. "- is it." And the same punctuation and capitalization applies to thoughts.

Quality challenges in the prologue (before characters have a chance to train them up) can be a bad idea -- all challenges are luck-based in this engine, remember, so players have no control over what happens, which can lead to a feeling of powerlessness and confusion. (It also makes the completionists sad, as they can't see both results and have no control over which one they get.) It's not a universal rule or anything, but it is something I've observed. If you want to introduce players to the mechanic, something that the Zero Summer guys did was give the challenges a 100% chance of success, even with a quality at 0, and I think this works fairly well as a "tutorial" kind of thing.

...after what felt like an eternity. I am lying horizontal with a piece of cloth on my body. No shoes though.
I proceed to climb to a vertical position but rise too quickly causing the blood to rush to my head. I'm now seeing stars as well as the street I'm standing in.

• Establish who your character is. (A specific person? A general avatar? A single-celled organism?)
• Orient the reader's narrative camera -- that is, establish what the reader is looking when they start playing.
• Let the reader know how much they're supposed to understand about the world. This can range from "you're a normal person on earth in Baltimore" to "you're on Mars and the year is 2029" or "this is a prose poem, you don't have a character at all."

• It doesn't establish the player's character. It does tell the player that Curio City is going to be told in the first person -- but it gives no details about who that person is. Nor do any of the subsequent storylets.
• It does orient the reader's camera, but it doesn't have enough description to really explain what that camera is pointed at.
• It doesn't tell the reader anything about the world. Is the narrator in Seattle, 2012? Is he on Jupiter? This gets clearer as the game goes on, but not much clearer and not fast enough.