Final Devlog!

Hi! whats up?

So basically, I worked on the website and worked on rewriting it in my style because I used way too much AI for the last one, so it seemed vibecoded.

I started out with a really basic page and slowly added more css. I chose a paper brown color scheme for the UI bc i think it fits the Bhagavad Gita app idea better.

I also spent a while practicing css and finally understand flexbox.

here are the things i added:

• navbar
• hack club flag that waves around
• chinmaya mission logo
• hover animations
• gameplay section with a youtube video
• minimalist layout

i made the hack club logo wave constantly, then stop and get a little bigger when you hover over it. that was fun.

Thats all! I also wanted to thank and give Chinmaya Mission credit for the audio recordings. (They didn’t even want recognition!)

I made a landing page for the website! I tried to make my own css but it looked kinda ahh so i ended up using a mixture of ChatGPT and Gemini to make the effects look way better. I still changed a bunch of stuff myself and messed around with the layout until it looked how i wanted. I also added my own screenshots to the website so people could actually see what it looks like instead of just reading about it. I spent some time changing little things like the spacing, colors, and animations to make it feel nicer overall. After i finished everything, i used git to upload all of the code to github so i could keep track of my changes and have it all backed up. Thats pretty much everything i worked on for the landing page!

Today ended up being a much bigger update than I originally planned. The original goal was simply to improve audio playback and make the application a little easier to use, but it gradually turned into a complete overhaul of the project. Earlier versions of Anukrama were entirely terminal-based and focused mainly on functionality rather than presentation. While they worked well enough for testing and practicing verses, they did not really feel like a finished Nintendo Switch application. As I continued working on the project, I decided it was time to build a proper interface. I started by experimenting with a few graphics libraries, but that quickly became frustrating due to dependency problems, linker errors, and build issues that consumed far more development time than expected. After spending a considerable amount of time trying to make those libraries cooperate, I eventually decided to take a different approach and build the rendering system myself using the Switch framebuffer along with FreeType for font rendering. This ended up being a much better solution because it gave me direct control over how text and graphics were displayed. One of the most important improvements from this change was proper Unicode support. Earlier versions struggled with Sanskrit transliteration characters, often displaying missing glyphs, incorrect symbols, or unreadable text. The new rendering system finally allowed me to render Unicode properly, which means verses and prompts can now appear correctly on screen. During the process I also redesigned the entire user interface, added larger text, created menu screens, introduced animated backgrounds, improved readability, added color-coded sections, and included a “Made by Aashvik Goel” credit within the application. Looking back, the difference between the original terminal version and the new interface is much larger than I expected when I first started making changes. The audio system also received significant improvements during this update. The application now supports separate prompt and answer recordings, allowing users to hear a prompt before revealing the complete verse. Implementing this required converting recordings into the correct PCM format, debugging playback issues, testing different audio configurations, and tracking down several recordings that did not behave as expected. While a small number of recordings still need additional work, the overall system is now much more reliable. Alongside the audio improvements, I added multiple study modes to make practice sessions more engaging. There is now a Solo Practice mode as well as a pass-and-play VS Mode where two players can take turns answering verses and earning points. Another major focus was testing on actual hardware rather than relying entirely on emulation. Although Ryujinx was extremely useful throughout development, I regularly installed builds directly onto my Nintendo Switch to verify that rendering, controls, performance, and audio behaved correctly on the real device. This helped uncover issues that would have been easy to miss in an emulator and made the project feel much more like a genuine homebrew application. By the end of this development cycle, Anukrama had gained a completely new rendering engine, proper Unicode support, improved audio playback, multiple study modes, a full menu system, animated visual effects, and a far more polished overall presentation. What originally started as a simple terminal-based study tool has now begun to feel like a complete Switch application designed specifically for practicing Bhagavad Gita verses.

hi again, i finally got a proper shell/menu system working for the app now.

right now it’s still really basic and mostly just a text UI, but it’s the first version where everything is structured properly instead of just random test code. you can move up and down with the dpad, press A to select options, and it switches between different states like practice, quiz, and settings.

it doesn’t actually do much yet in those modes, but that’s kind of the point of this step. i basically wanted to build a shell first so all the core navigation and input handling is stable before i start adding the real features. before this, everything was just separate test snippets, but now it’s all inside one loop with proper states, so it’s way easier to expand without breaking things.

pressing + still quits the app, and i made sure the input system is using the correct libnx setup from the examples, so the controls actually work properly on real hardware instead of randomly failing like before.

now that this shell is done, i can actually start building the real parts of the project. the plan is to plug in the verse system into practice mode first, where it shows a prompt and then eventually makes you continue the verse. quiz mode will probably come after that once the structure is solid.

Anyways, here is a pic of the shell from an emulator:

Hi everyone! I just started this project so i can get more comfortable with making my own games/apps, and I rlly wanted to make a switch app! So here’s my plan: I want to make a fully interactive and immersive 2d UI but i think ill make a text shell first so all the features work and ill make the UI later. when i was starting to make the code, I made a screen which said press + to exit. I pressed plus, but the game didn’t quit like it was supposed to. After making a test code to print all buttons pressed, I found out my code wasn’t even receiving any inputs.

I had to ask on reddit and I still couldn’t find any answers so i looked in the demo folder of the library I installed and was able to fix my code after reading the proper controller initialization that I should have used.

Here is a picture from an emulator of what the output is supposed to look like: