Hey there! It's me Zar and I'm going to level with you, setting up surfaces.txt sucks. I've left a lot of commentary in the file itself, but it may give you a lot of trouble at first. Make sure to read the walkthrough site carefully! All my commentary in surfaces.txt is reproduced there, and may be easier to read than just a straight text file.

This ghost template is simple on purpose too make it as easy as possible for a new ghost developer, so it doesn't really touch on a lot of the more complicated things you can do with surfaces.txt. I explain some tricks within surfaces.txt itself, but you don't have to use them if you don't want to. Advanced users may want to keep them in mind though, and check the more in-depth pages about surfaces.txt on the walkthrough page. Which is here, just in case you got this from somewhere else (?)!

http://www.ashido.com/ukagaka/

Some more handy resources about surfaces.txt can be found where FLELE shell makers congregate, namely at shell-collectors on devart. So here are a few links to some tutorials about surfaces.txt that may come in handy, you may want to read these and then come back and tackle surfaces.txt with new ideas if you're feeling adventurous.

http://shell-collectors.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Make-a-FLELE-Shell-256095495
http://shell-collectors.deviantart.com/art/Flele-Coding-Tutorial-173914239
http://shell-collectors.deviantart.com/art/Flele-Coding-Tutorial-2-1-180479304
http://shell-collectors.deviantart.com/art/Flele-Coding-Tut-3-pt-1-of-2-194386056
http://shell-collectors.deviantart.com/art/Flele-Coding-Tut-3-pt-2-of-2-196349241

Other resources listed on the walkthrough site are (and these are all in Japanese for the record, so you may have to use Google translate)...

http://usada.sakura.vg/contents/seriko.html
http://disc2.s56.xrea.com/manual/manual_animation.html
http://ssp.shillest.net/ukadoc/manual/descript_shell_surfaces.html

If you're looking to do more in-depth work with shells, these are definitely the places you'll want to go to get more info.