Booting up a devlog here for Craft so I can stop spamming #showandtell on Discord.
Craft is a fun quirky creative space for the Playdate. A single space where you can create music, paint, building with blocks, and more. Heavy Mario Paint inspiration.
Here's a recent screen capture of an experimental painting mode which uses the crank:
Worked a bit on UI for Paint this evening: some tool icons and toolbar. They read pretty well on device. Thinking I’ll use B to switch to toolbar mode and hold B to quickly open color/stamp picker (vs having to go to toolbar and then select color/stamp picker).
Moved color picker to the top. This way simply pressing B will select color/stamp picker control first so flipping between colors and stamps will be quick. Perhaps still hold B to open picker directly.
Worked on some tools today and some prep for adding stamps/artwork to sample from while drawing. Paint won’t just be shades but also patterns and small images. Very similar to Mario Paint.
Also trying the name “Tinker” on for size. 
Tinker Stamp tool working. You’ll have to imagine the fun sound it makes when using. 
Now to get the color/pattern picker working.
Pattern based paint working now. Not a great sample pattern, but you get the idea. So that makes image based paint (great for stamps), pattern image based paint, and shade based paint. Now to work on the color/pattern picker for reals!
Implemented paint bucket that supports pattern image fills too. I may rewrite this in C so it is faster but the performance is --okay-- in Lua. It really wasn’t until I moved to a scanline stack based flood algorithm. I’m animating the fill which I like (can play sfx while it is filling in).
I don’t know why I’m avoiding writing any part of this in C. Perhaps once C is involved it becomes a … project. 
Spent some time on navigation in Tinker Paint today. Feels pretty good. Need to clean up tool selection styling. I’m sure this could use some fine tuning but I’m too close to it after hours of work. Going to step back and let the family play with it and see what confusion falls out of that.
Next up: Color picker. Probably.
Some more work on the toolbar. Redid icons to have a straight-on angle and a bit of animation when flipping between them. “Tabbing” around the UI is limited to a single button press now vs my attempt at being intuitive by allowing different buttons to move around the UI.
Starting to rethink the name Tinker. It’s just not quite right for what this is. Tinker makes me think of electronics and such. Definitely not there yet with the name. I don’t know, Playmat? Playroom? Was Craft better? Shrug.
This evening I experimented with rotating image stamps when using the crank. Feels good I think and opens some drawing possibilities that were impossible before. Pattern images and “colors” (aka shades) do not rotate however as they would generally look bad.
Also trying the name Playmake on for size. 
This morning came up with the name Dabble which I kinda like. Bit more playful than Playmake and less technical than Tinker or Craft.
Nope. Going with Playmaker for now. haha.
Was having a rough day with audio issues so stepped away to mess around with the menu. Temporary but at least it was fun to work on. Have added a bunch of stuff over the past few days. Experimenting with some consistency between spaces. Toolbar on right. Same buttons to get around the UI. etc.
I love dev-logs!
Keep it up.
Thanks Matt! Yeah, it’s kinda nice to have a space to clock out my thoughts and progress at the end of the day.
Took another stab at menu fun. Little less Johnny Mnemonic. Most likely won’t survive the week lol.
I was looking for a way to keep the water excited after the initial plop of letters. Previously I would just randomly “touch” the water offscreen and let the resulting ripples cascade across screen. Wasn’t a fan of that approach so I added … bubbles? Also you can press up/down on d pad and it’ll touch the water’s surface at a random location. OK, that took up most of my morning. I really need to stop playing around with the menu. BUT IT’S FUN.
That really is a fun menu
Added a cheap transition animation when switching zones (I feel like I’ve seen a similar transition in every one of my favorite SNES games). Plays a little clarinet riff too.
Note: that white edge that appears when calling display.setOffset() (as seen at the bottom right edge of the transition gif above) can be changed by calling graphics.setBackgroundColor(…). Less jarring now set to black.