PICO-8, which the parent article only name dropped without explaining why he felt it wasn't adequate, has these things you're talking built in, and was designed

PICO-8, which the parent article only name dropped without explaining why he felt it wasn't adequate, has these things you're talking built in, and was designed with making simple games specifically. The editor has a built in sprite, level, and music editor, and you can also download any game and then enter edit mode to see what code it used, just like I did with QBasic games as a kid. It's not exactly as easy as QBasic, since it's based on LUA syntax, but it's pretty darn close that I don't think it should be ruled out. It's the closest thing since Adobe Flash that gave me a similar feeling to making games in QBasic.