scratch-www VS phaser

LiveCode is about the closest literal logical successor to HyperCard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode?wprov=sfti1

That said, I think Scratch is a better learning environment these days and you can develop workable apps in the style of HyperCard. There are plenty of tutorials, documentation, and examples to work from.

https://scratch.mit.edu

and https://codecombat.com, which has been around for a while now.

I think this paradigm (navigating a character using "move" function invocations) is good but kind of exhausts its usefulness after a while. I question whether my daughter learns coding this way or just is playing a turn based top down platformer. The most code like thing is when you use 'loops' to have characters repeat sequences of moves. I think when kids grok these things these apps become just types of glofiried education flavoured video games. There are a lot of things in kodable for instance that I feel are just basic web games with coding terms slapped on it.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ is more like 'programming' imo, even at the level of the objective -- having a blank canvas to create something. It seems a little advanced for my kids right now though.

+1 Scratch! My son started with it, then expanded into Roblox/Lua.

Children can download other people's games and experiment there. Scratch also has pre-made art, sounds, music.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

Scratch.mit.edu is a highly-recommended place to start [1] https://scratch.mit.edu/

> Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. [2]

1: https://scratch.mit.edu/

https://scratch.mit.edu/ (Scratch version 2)

Someone who uses scratch.mit.edu (like me)

Now that I think of it, I did start game development on scratch before going right into java (because of minecraft).

If you're targeting the browser first why not use a browser first library like PhaserJS [0]?. I don't see a reason to work around with WASM; HTML5 canvas might be everything that you need.

[0] https://phaser.io/

Gold : GitHub, Phaser Studio, Arcadia

Versatility: JavaScript is not limited to web browsers. It's used in a variety of environments, including mobile app development (using frameworks like React Native), game development (using libraries like Phaser), and even serverless computing (using platforms like AWS Lambda).

This reminds me of my first real dev job, 10y ago, making small facebook games with https://phaser.io it was actually kind of fun now that I think back.

Is it worth it? I think while attempting to create a game engine with the Canvas API and vanilla JavaScript. (I quickly ditched that idea and started using PhaserJS)

I didn't try to build anything with Phaser, but I evaluated it a bit when trying to pick a game engine for a 2D web game.

The tech didn't impress me that much, but it also seemed like the most mature 2D game engine available in JS.

Notably, Phaser 4 was announced ~four years ago and was an attempt to get the project written natively in TypeScript. It looks pretty dead in the water - https://github.com/phaserjs/phaser and having a "best effort" TypeScript experience layered onto Phaser 3 didn't excite me.

Additionally, with browsers gaining support for WebGPU, I expect any game engine worth their snuff to begin rapidly adopting support for WebGPU. As best I can tell, any hope of Phaser supporting WebGPU is lumped into Phaser 4, so... not much to say there.

Overall, it was a little tough for me to tell if I was being overly critical and viewing a mature product as a ghost town, but that's the impression I took away from it.

As far as I can tell, BabylonJS is king in town for a TypeScript game engine, but its focus is 3D experiences. I didn't find an especially compelling 2D game engine. I ended up making a prototype using React + PixiJS + React-Pixi, but that was hardly an engine and had significant performance issues.

Now I am building in Rust with Bevy. It's slow going, creating UI elements sucks right now, but the underlying tech is super solid and I feel good about what I write and what I learn even if I'm dismayed at the pace in which I am creating.