Hello! This is my first dev forum post! Glad to be here.
My programming experience is mostly Adventure Game Studio, so I gravitated towards using ZeroBrane Studio, a Lua IDE. I got stuck pretty early going through the Inside Playdate documentation, though.
I pasted the "3. A Basic Playdate Game in Lua" code into ZeroBrane but I got a compilation error (see attached image). This is with PlaydateSDK-0.11.0-98931_2218b0e.
Judging from this post (regarding a similar issue) by @nick_splendorr (Is there a Lua 5.4 Syntax extension for VS Code? - #3 by nick_splendorr) with VS Code regarding local <const> and += and -= Playdate convenience features, this may be a common stumbling block. What can be done about this? Nick brings up "modifying a syntax highlighter" as a solution, but that sounds way beyond my capabilities.
A possible solution could be to updating ZeroBrane to Lua 5.4, but I don't know how to do that (its current is version 5.3). I've tried, but my knowledge is very limited. I tried following these instructions but couldn't make it work. But come to think of it, if the syntax errors are Playdate convenience features -- Maybe that wouldn't help anyway.
I'm crossing my fingers for a relatively easy to implement solution! It's very, very possible I missed an important step in all of this -- My heart hopes so, but my ego doesn't!
Welcome! Love your adventure game work and loved your Photoshop "realisation" video.
I think the easiest solution here is to see downgrade the code to syntax that is suitable for your IDE.
So simply remove all <const> (a Lua 5.4 thing; they're not strictly needed but help Lua run your code more optimally) and expand x += y to x = x + y (a Playdate SDK thing; not part of Lua) and so on.
I still have no solution for the -= and += highlighting, but the <const> highlighting, undefined globals, and lowercase globals can be taken care of pretty simply with settings.json in your .vscode folder of your project directory. This is what mine looks like:
Welcome, Julia! The best I can recommend is that you avoid Lua 5.4 and Playdate convenience features. As @matt said, doesn't seem to be a huge deal for performance, and += / -= (while convenient, not really that much shorter than a = a + 1).
The only editor I know of that handles all of this is Panic's Nova, which is Mac-only, and may come up short in other features depending on your needs, since it's new and doesn't have a fully-developed extension ecosystem yet.
@ast-rsk, those VS Code settings tips are great! I haven't made any progress toward actually implementing those features in VS Code! Outside my experience, too. But I've gotten by perfectly fine without <const> and +=!
Hello, folks! Thanks for your kind words and thanks so much for the tips n' tricks! I've replaced all the <const> stuff in the example game and that bit works fine now. Hooray!
I've being trying the Playdate extension for VSCode and following the instructions as best I can, but I'm stuck on a couple things. I have Microsoft VS Code and the Playdate SDK in my workspace, but getting the warning "Property source is not allowed" for launch.json. For these two lines: "source": "${workspaceFolder}/Source", "output": "${workspaceFolder}/Output",. I didn't think I needed to edit those lines, but do I?
Second issue is when I try to copy and paste the example game from "3. A Basic Playdate Game in Lua" in the Inside Playdate documentation: Undefined global import. I've tried specifying the path for the import (Copy Path / Copy Relative Path) but those don't work either. I get the same issue in ZeroBrane (a Lua IDE): attempt to call global 'import' (a nil value). Is there something I need to define elsewhere?
I was having issues with import not being recognized, getting this error:
main.lua:1: attempt to call a nil value (global 'import')
...since I only gave VSCode a Lua extension and not a Playdate one. This extension suggestion fixed my build (though I used the midouest one instead), thank you!
Love your adventure game work and loved your Photoshop "realisation" video. 
