Excalibur VS heaps

Excalibur.js - A game engine for the web written in TypeScript. It’s my current choice for prototyping because the docs are clearly written and the TypeScript tells you the rest. https://excaliburjs.com/

I'm a web dev by profession working on large scale web apps. I absolutely hate Phaser. It feels like going a decade back in time. Excalibur is newer to the market though and I've played around with it and really enjoyed it. Written with TypeScript and they're working on implementing an ECS system. https://excaliburjs.com/

Another option is Excalibur, a game engine being built in TypeScript. Looks great and their docs are easy to follow. I tried it out to make a simple game, and was able to produce something in a couple hours. I saw a few PRs get merged a while back that involved their own implementation of an ECS system. I think the work is still in progress though, so I don't know if they've documented it yet. Their team do this as a hobby I think, so progress is pretty slow since it occupies their free time. https://excaliburjs.com/ https://github.com/excaliburjs/Excalibur/pulls

Maybe the engine used for Dead Cells, https://heaps.io ?

I've personally had a very good experience with Haxe and Haxeflixel (https://haxeflixel.com/) although Heaps (https://heaps.io/) seems to be more popular nowadays.

Haxe is very nice as a language, can easily cross-compile to a lot of targets, Haxeflixel is heavily inspired by some Actionscript framework and has a lot of goodies. Maybe Heaps is more mature, up to date and allows for more advanced features.

Not really the worst, but you can say my least favorite, and that would be heaps.io

Yeah I think it's ideal for 2D development. Look into heaps.io . . you might like it! These days it seems the best source of community for haxe is in their official discord server.

Many frameworks will let you export for the web, even if you don't code your game in JS. Unity, Godot, Bevy(?), heaps.io ... the list goes on and on.

It takes a little while to get comfortable with heaps.io, largely because tutorials in the Haxe world are pretty limited. Here's a good place to start:

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most people use Unity or Godot for jams these days. But as long as your framework exports for the web, you should be fine. Personally, I use haxe and heaps.io, but it's a bit of an outlier and probably requires learning a new language on top of learning a framework.