GlyphNotes DevBlog Jan' 24

Introduction

GlpyhNotes is a simple notetaking app for the Playdate handheld console. 

This devblog discusses the initial alpha release of GlyphNotes and future plans for features before 1.0 release.

Latest Achievements

Milestones Reached

• Released the project to the public!
• After many long nights of learning the Playdate dev pipeline, seeing what works (and doesn't), learning the limitations of the Playdate console, and staring deep into 1000 lines of code for a note taking application I have finally reached a nearly fully-functional (and very stable) alpha release of GlyphNotes

New Features Implemented

• New books can be created
  • New books have book names
  • New books have a user configured page count (currently cannot be changed after book creation)
• Books can be loaded
  • On the load screen you can select from the different books you have saved
  • You can also edit the names of books on this screen by selection the book options button
• Settings
  • 4 Fonts have been implemented with more to come.
• Book View (note taking)
  • Each page of the book essentially has an infinite length of lines that can be written on
  • At the top of each page show p.#.# which stands for p.PAGE.LINE

Visual Progress (Samples)

Challenges and Solutions

Obstacles Encountered

• Code for rendering screen graphics and handling inputs and screen changes can all get out of hand quite quickly
• Playdate API has some very long object, property, and method names that can make code readability a nightmare

Strategies and Solutions

• Just took a little elbow grease learning a bit more about LUA and getting the code all segmented nice and neat so that data loading code doesn't interfere with screen rendering, or input etc.

Behind the Scenes

Development Process

• For about 3 weeks I spent about 5-6 hours a day learning LUA, the Playdate API, and going through many iterations
• Primary tools are the Playdate SDK, VSCode (LUA), and PowerShell for building the .pdx files. 

Future Plans

Upcoming Features

• Editing page count of books after creating the books,
  • This will be non-destructive. (i.e. if you make a book shorter and lose a page you had notes on they don't actually get deleted, but rather hidden.)
• Checkbox lists

Community Engagement

• If you have any fun ideas, suggestions, or bugs please reach out in the discussion on the itch.io page!

Conclusion

Thank you all for downloading and I hope you enjoy using GlyphNotes!