As of yesterday, I had something that could play a pre-written melody on the Playdate. As of today, I can write out new melodies on the Playdate, listen to them, play them in reverse, and even added a crude visualization of the notes.
A great deal remains, but I am approaching a functional music box, which I can carry around and sketch music with on the go. Ideally, before long, I'll have controls for things like song length and divisions per rotation, as well as the separate organ and music box sections. I'd also like to improve the rendering of the spokes soon - I like them the way they are, not like the pimples from before.
I am frustrated by Playdate's way of handling synthesis. I don't think I'm quite ready to build a new synth system from scratch, but I do think that I should get some samples in quickly.
The organ is probably going to be from recordings of my concertina, and the music box from either the music box that I have or the kalimba - I think the kalimba has a sweeter sound, and it certainly produces deeper notes.
I probably won't have much time to work on this tomorrow or the day after, but I'll try to get back to it soon. Progress so far has been very quick and easy, but it won't stay like that forever.
Significantly, some of the early development barriers that I have encountered with other tools have been notably missing here. It was incredible to set up my development environment quickly, download and modify a demo project, plug the Playdate into my laptop, and build to it immediately. Frictionless. Similarly, I don't think I've ever really used Lua before, and despite some major quirks like 1-indexing and the whole "everything is tables" deal, I've been able to get everything that I've wanted to happen to happen VERY quickly.
I had initially hoped to give myself a smaller, more manageable project to begin with, but I am following my motivation where it takes me. I'm excited to see where I end up.