Heliodex project update – September 2024

Hello again. Here's another monthly update to show what I've been working on.

Sprig Shooter

The Heliodex/sprig repository includes a set of tools and the Sprig Shooter game for the Hack Club Sprig game console. While the engine was designed to work with tile-based games, Sprig Shooter is a bitmap-based arcade-style game. Shoot enemies and avoid crashing into them to gain score, and the game gets harder as you progress.

The limited capabilities of the Sprig was a fun challenge to work around, and making bitmap graphics and music alongside custom engine behaviour and collision detection was a great learning experience. I've applied to get my hands on the real hardware, and I can't wait to see how the game runs on it.

nostaking

For notetaking in general, my weapon of choice over the past few years has been MindMup, chiefly with their top-down hierarchical view, short atomic descriptions, and huge maps (~3000 nodes). However I've always had some gripes with its performance, UI, and display density, so I've been working on a custom notetaking tool.

A MindMup-like tree view ended up being difficult to write, so I'm going for a column-based layout instead, which may make parents/children of nodes difficult to parse, but provides a much denser information view. The project was named nostaking because I was planning to store notes on Nostr, though for the time being it'll be local-first.