8 ms·

Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

263 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

re 6y ago
Previous discussion (from 5 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774
lrmunoz 6y ago
It seems this is aimed at young people learning how to program. My main problem with using Javascript as the first programming language to learn is the asynchronous callback paradigm, I believe it's too complicated a concept to teach in the very beginning (and you can't get around that with Javascript). When I evaluated different languages / environments to start teaching programming to my daughters I decided not to use Javascript because of that, chose Python instead (and now I'm also considering making games with Roblox, which is based on Lua. The dev environment is quite complex but with supervision Lua is a nice & simple programming language)
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Hm, but how does it work in python? Don't you have asynchronous calls there, too? (my main problem with JS as a programming first language is its C-Style syntax)
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    The secret of Javascript syntax is that, once you grok how functions are just special objects, it's actually a Lisp with a bunch of weird cruft attached to it.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      And that is very helpful for a beginner to know ...
  - RobertKerans 6y ago
    Yes, but it isn't the core way the language works -- you don't need to approach asynchronicity very early on as you do with JS, and it's not all closures. At some point someone learning Python will have to do something async. But what they can do up until then is just not do anything async, and that's fine (just wait for stuff to complete...). That's not really an option in JS: the great benefit of the language from a learner perspective is that it just runs straightaway in the browser, everywhere. But to actually do anything interesting (click a button, make something happen), that's async. Re. the syntax, anecdata but I've helped beginners through their initial steps for about 6 years now in JS (and Python) and C-type syntax is just not an issue that slows down learning or causes issues. There are only so many different ways syntax can be structured so it's sane for a compiler to parse, they all work basically the same way, and people get used to a syntax really quickly
    - tobr 6y ago
      I’m sure you know about async/await in JavaScript? It sounds like the issue you have is not so much with the traditional paradigm of using callbacks, but the fact that the “default” environment in JavaScript is a GUI rather than a CLI, meaning that you need to figure out things like event handlers pretty early on?
      - RobertKerans 6y ago
        Yes, default environment is the browser, that's a given and that's fine: if you are a beginner, making stuff happen there is easy and rewarding. Everyone has easy access to it [I apologise for being a little snippy here]. I don't have an issue here: I don't think you & sibling commenters are really getting that these are beginners I'm talking about. Yes, I am aware of async/await. With the browser being the default environment, a beginner has to understand callback-related programming with JS quickly: they need to be able to say "I want to do this then this". You have do this via callbacks. You can write JS synchronously, but IME this isn't practical. Using async/await isn't some magic bullet here. You can write synchronous-looking asynchronous code, but the level I'm talking about is: what does asynchronous mean? What does synchronous mean? Once they've got that (which is not simple), what's a Promise? That one's fun because you need to explain the concept and how they work first, and generally that's gibberish. Async/await helps, so say I ignore Promises and go straight to that. At which point the learner starts getting errors to do with unresolved values. And back to Promises we go. And so on. I would say that I don't think there's any magic language that makes things easy for learners, and JS has many advantages over any other one, mainly to do with its general accessibility. But it's a fairly weird language in how it works, it isn't the simplest.
- deepstack 6y ago
  Maybe try little javascripter would be good for your kid. https://www.crockford.com/little.html https://www.crockford.com/little.html
- z3t4 6y ago
  JavaScript itself is not async. It's the programs/engines that runs the scripting language that have decided to make it async with callbacks. For example Microsoft JS is not async. * ES2022? do have some garbage collection hook that uses a callback, so if that makes it into the standard you could say that JS/ES is async. JavaScript itself does not (yet) have any async functions.
  - zzbzq 6y ago
    'Async' here refers not only to the keyword but also to what is achieved, in classic javascript, through callback functions
    - z3t4 6y ago
      Even though there is the async keyword and Promise() there are no async functions nor callbacks in JavaScript itself. For example setInterval and setTimeout is not part of the language and needs to be implemented by the runtime/program that runs the JavaScript.
- amasad 6y ago
  I had a similar concern, that's why we started with Python initially (see my top-level comment). However, Kaboom's programming model is actually quite simple. It doesn't suffer from any callback hell. You should give it a go. It's modeled a bit after the block-like paradigm introduced by Scratch, which I guess you can call "async" but seems really intuitive for kids.
grenoire 6y ago
I wish I had such tools when I was growing up building games! I had to battle ncurses, Allegro, OpenGL, and many more lower-level tech just to get some basic I/O. I'm not too sad about it because it paved the way to my stronger understanding of computer technologies, but at the same time it took me way longer to build playable games. I think this is a step before making Minecraft mods or Roblox games, but definitely a welcome one for the coming generation of creative kids.
- bemmu 6y ago
  Amos on the Amiga was pretty great. I was able to get sprites moving around, respond to mouse clicks, even some simple 3D with an extension. Admittedly never actually made a playable game, as my programming chops weren't good enough yet. There was a small community making games with it, and they would be distributed among other shareware.
  - mlok 6y ago
    Last week I found my old floppy disks for the STOS (AMOS equivalent for the Atari ST) I never managed to build a real game with it at the time although I had created some on the Amstrad CPC 6128 before. If we had had the internet back then, it would have made such a difference to be able to connect to those communities !
  - beardyw 6y ago
    As an adult at the time I made a game with AMOS (Mouse Impossible) and it was published free as a magazine cover disk. I was prouder of that than anything I did at work!
- Iv 6y ago
  That's something I encounter a lot too when wondering what tool to propose kids to start programming. I had GW-BASIC. It took two lines to draw a line on the screen. There are not a lot of things as easy nowadays
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tomcooks 6y ago
https://kaboomjs.com/ https://kaboomjs.com/ seems a better URL
- areille 6y ago
  "Replit now supports KaboomJS" seems a better title
  - qnsi 6y ago
    it did support replit from the start, KaboomJS was created by replit guys
gammalost 6y ago
What does bloat free mean in this case? There seems to be no explanation
- laszlokorte 6y ago
  Maybe boilerplate free?
  - amasad 6y ago
    Yes, no boilerplate but also the library is pretty straightforward. All in this one file: https://github.com/replit/kaboom/blob/master/src/kaboom.js https://github.com/replit/kaboom/blob/master/src/kaboom.js
92g3r2ogr9asof 6y ago
Jonathan Blow is going to love this.
- sublimefire 6y ago
  In one of his (J.B.) talks [1] he explained how prototyping of game ideas is important. From that perspective having a platform like this helps. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISutk1mauPM&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISutk1mauPM&t=12s
ktpsns 6y ago
I love the music video for the library: https://cms.replit.com/assets/kaboom/kaboom.mp4 https://cms.replit.com/assets/kaboom/kaboom.mp4 -- can you tell me any code library which has a music video about it? That's a great way of introduction.
beansontoast 6y ago
bloat free!
itsbits 6y ago
Nice...I have used Phaser for couple of games...API looks bit similar to Phaser... Would like to understand the differences if anyone explored already?
- amasad 6y ago
  We love Phaser, but while possibly more powerful, we felt it's a lot more complex and harder to get started with. To demonstrate try comparing the hello world examples from Phaser vs Kaboom.
abrookewood 6y ago
OK, do yourself a favour and watch the introductory video. Probably the most unique intro I've yet to see for a programming library.
- sscarduzio 6y ago
  Best intro video in years
- simonknoll 6y ago
  thanks for the hint, it was worth watching it!
- high_byte 6y ago
  wasn't going to watch it. I'm glad I saw your comment
- amasad 6y ago
  :) fully produced in-house by our designer Tga. Song on SoundCloud too https://m.soundcloud.com/replit/kaboom https://m.soundcloud.com/replit/kaboom
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    I hope you used kaboom to create the kaboom video! Was fun to watch indeed, All the best.
- r6203 6y ago
  Reminds me of the Land of Lisp video—in a good way. http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    Time to port Grand Theft Wumpus (the most violent programming example ever put into a textbook) to Kaboom.js?
- sunsipples 6y ago
luke2m 6y ago
This looks like a better version of scratch.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Scratch is drag-and-drop, no actual typing code, so this is quite different.
tobyhinloopen 6y ago
The video was great but the first 10 seconds of black screen is questionable. I want all libraries and frameworks to be presented this way
- amasad 6y ago
  Correction, its not totally black, it says “fwonky intro” xD
amasad 6y ago
Cool to see Kaboom on HN again! Kaboom is the culmination of multiple attempts at creating a game programming environment aimed at new coders. It started in 2018 when we noticed that many kids come to Replit from Scratch ready to transition from blocks to coding and get lost trying to find the best way to make games. There are many ways to make games with Replit -- pygame, html, love2d -- but based on our research there was still a big gap between the focused and intuitive experience at something like Scratch and anything that we offered at Replit. It felt like we were letting them down. We thought in order to meet their needs we needed something that satisfied the following constraints: 1. required no setup, importing modules, or any other scaffolding before you start coding 2. had powerful primitives to make something interesting in a handful of lines of code 3. simple programming model 4. easy to import and use images and other assets Our first attempt at this was a Python library called Play (https://github.com/replit/play https://github.com/replit/play). Play satisfied many of the constraints but because it was written in Python, and we execute Python on the server and stream graphics down to the client via VNC (https://blog.replit.com/native-graphics-love https://blog.replit.com/native-graphics-love), the experience wasn't uniformly good for everyone using Replit. For example, for kids in India it was really bad (since then we started replicating our servers in India and other places in the world https://blog.replit.com/global https://blog.replit.com/global). Our second attempt was a classic BASIC implementation. BASIC was easy to get started with, it had zero bloat, and you could get something on the screen quickly. Sadly, users grew out of the language really quickly. BASIC made simple things straightforward but anything slightly more advanced was hard to impossible to make. I kept trying to evolve the language until it became kind of like QBASIC (optional line numbers, labels, etc). But it felt like sisyphean task. BASIC HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052050 BASIC docs: https://docs.replit.com/misc/basic https://docs.replit.com/misc/basic Last year, around the same time I gave up on "completing" BASIC I saw a job application come in for a designer from an indie game dev Tga. Tga was not only a great designer but also an awesome programmer, so we hired him. I pitched him on this project, we started prototyping it in Replit and got something working fairly quickly (early prototypes here: https://replit.com/@gameenv https://replit.com/@gameenv). When we rolled out an alpha version the most surprising thing that happened was that people on our team got addicted to making games. We weren't the target audience, but that's always a good sign. Then kids in our community started having a lot of fun with it -- the more we tested the more conviction we had that we had a solution to the problem. The last few months we spent working on the Kaboom environment on Replit. It has an awesome asset editor, and a kick-ass debugging tools. And pretty soon we're going to have great autocomplete and intelisense. To learn more check out the following: - Kaboom blogpost: https://blog.replit.com/kaboom https://blog.replit.com/kaboom - Show HN by designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 - Repo: https://github.com/replit/kaboom https://github.com/replit/kaboom Some games from the community: - ReplJewled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled - Flappy Mark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark - Bamboo Ninja https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam - Cookie Vs Oreo https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOMOMOMOM https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOM...
foobarbecue 6y ago
On the front page twice in less than a week! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 Wonder if that's a record. /me resists urge to write a script to find out
- RobKohr 6y ago
  Way to dodge nerd sniping yourself :) We are at times our own worst enemy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
alternate/main url from 6 days ago: https://kaboomjs.com/ https://kaboomjs.com/ previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774
raphaelrk 6y ago
This is such a wonderful initiative and could bring so many kids into programming! So many people start programming in order to make games and I could see this developing into the new standard for it & it being supported first class in replit makes it super simple to create and share your game. I got a chance to try out kaboom last weekend and while it's already great for games, I'd love for it to also have more support for visualizations, something I used to spend a ton of time on in high school in khanacademy's processing.js editor[1]. Kaboom's support for ES6 and WebGL, focus on gaming, and integration with replit would make it a much better tool than KA for this. Some things in particular I'd like to see from kaboom for viz - it's missing basic raw functions like drawEllipse, the docs were difficult to read (I wish it would say what params something takes instead of "[conf]"), and in the end I failed to port over my voronoi viz[2][3]. If they decide this would be a good focus for them, I'd suggest having one of the built-in kaboom examples on replit to be a visualization. [1] https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/raphaelrk/projects https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/raphaelrk/projects [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/quick-voronoi/5465818696744960 https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/quick-voron... [3] https://replit.com/@raphaelrk/CumbersomeAdmiredStrategies https://replit.com/@raphaelrk/CumbersomeAdmiredStrategies
zelon88 6y ago
The addLevel() function seems especially interesting. It takes an array as input to generate the level, with each index being another row of the level. Here is the level from the linked platformer example..... " $ ", " ==== ", " ", " ^^ ", "=============",

263 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

re 6y ago

Previous discussion (from 5 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774

lrmunoz 6y ago

It seems this is aimed at young people learning how to program. My main problem with using Javascript as the first programming language to learn is the asynchronous callback paradigm, I believe it's too complicated a concept to teach in the very beginning (and you can't get around that with Javascript). When I evaluated different languages / environments to start teaching programming to my daughters I decided not to use Javascript because of that, chose Python instead (and now I'm also considering making games with Roblox, which is based on Lua. The dev environment is quite complex but with supervision Lua is a nice & simple programming language)

hutzlibu 6y ago
Hm, but how does it work in python? Don't you have asynchronous calls there, too? (my main problem with JS as a programming first language is its C-Style syntax)
- crooked-v 6y ago
  The secret of Javascript syntax is that, once you grok how functions are just special objects, it's actually a Lisp with a bunch of weird cruft attached to it.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    And that is very helpful for a beginner to know ...
- RobertKerans 6y ago
  Yes, but it isn't the core way the language works -- you don't need to approach asynchronicity very early on as you do with JS, and it's not all closures. At some point someone learning Python will have to do something async. But what they can do up until then is just not do anything async, and that's fine (just wait for stuff to complete...). That's not really an option in JS: the great benefit of the language from a learner perspective is that it just runs straightaway in the browser, everywhere. But to actually do anything interesting (click a button, make something happen), that's async. Re. the syntax, anecdata but I've helped beginners through their initial steps for about 6 years now in JS (and Python) and C-type syntax is just not an issue that slows down learning or causes issues. There are only so many different ways syntax can be structured so it's sane for a compiler to parse, they all work basically the same way, and people get used to a syntax really quickly
  - tobr 6y ago
    I’m sure you know about async/await in JavaScript? It sounds like the issue you have is not so much with the traditional paradigm of using callbacks, but the fact that the “default” environment in JavaScript is a GUI rather than a CLI, meaning that you need to figure out things like event handlers pretty early on?
    - RobertKerans 6y ago
      Yes, default environment is the browser, that's a given and that's fine: if you are a beginner, making stuff happen there is easy and rewarding. Everyone has easy access to it [I apologise for being a little snippy here]. I don't have an issue here: I don't think you & sibling commenters are really getting that these are beginners I'm talking about. Yes, I am aware of async/await. With the browser being the default environment, a beginner has to understand callback-related programming with JS quickly: they need to be able to say "I want to do this then this". You have do this via callbacks. You can write JS synchronously, but IME this isn't practical. Using async/await isn't some magic bullet here. You can write synchronous-looking asynchronous code, but the level I'm talking about is: what does asynchronous mean? What does synchronous mean? Once they've got that (which is not simple), what's a Promise? That one's fun because you need to explain the concept and how they work first, and generally that's gibberish. Async/await helps, so say I ignore Promises and go straight to that. At which point the learner starts getting errors to do with unresolved values. And back to Promises we go. And so on. I would say that I don't think there's any magic language that makes things easy for learners, and JS has many advantages over any other one, mainly to do with its general accessibility. But it's a fairly weird language in how it works, it isn't the simplest.
deepstack 6y ago
Maybe try little javascripter would be good for your kid. https://www.crockford.com/little.html https://www.crockford.com/little.html
z3t4 6y ago
JavaScript itself is not async. It's the programs/engines that runs the scripting language that have decided to make it async with callbacks. For example Microsoft JS is not async. * ES2022? do have some garbage collection hook that uses a callback, so if that makes it into the standard you could say that JS/ES is async. JavaScript itself does not (yet) have any async functions.
- zzbzq 6y ago
  'Async' here refers not only to the keyword but also to what is achieved, in classic javascript, through callback functions
  - z3t4 6y ago
    Even though there is the async keyword and Promise() there are no async functions nor callbacks in JavaScript itself. For example setInterval and setTimeout is not part of the language and needs to be implemented by the runtime/program that runs the JavaScript.
amasad 6y ago
I had a similar concern, that's why we started with Python initially (see my top-level comment). However, Kaboom's programming model is actually quite simple. It doesn't suffer from any callback hell. You should give it a go. It's modeled a bit after the block-like paradigm introduced by Scratch, which I guess you can call "async" but seems really intuitive for kids.

grenoire 6y ago

I wish I had such tools when I was growing up building games! I had to battle ncurses, Allegro, OpenGL, and many more lower-level tech just to get some basic I/O. I'm not too sad about it because it paved the way to my stronger understanding of computer technologies, but at the same time it took me way longer to build playable games. I think this is a step before making Minecraft mods or Roblox games, but definitely a welcome one for the coming generation of creative kids.

bemmu 6y ago
Amos on the Amiga was pretty great. I was able to get sprites moving around, respond to mouse clicks, even some simple 3D with an extension. Admittedly never actually made a playable game, as my programming chops weren't good enough yet. There was a small community making games with it, and they would be distributed among other shareware.
- mlok 6y ago
  Last week I found my old floppy disks for the STOS (AMOS equivalent for the Atari ST) I never managed to build a real game with it at the time although I had created some on the Amstrad CPC 6128 before. If we had had the internet back then, it would have made such a difference to be able to connect to those communities !
- beardyw 6y ago
  As an adult at the time I made a game with AMOS (Mouse Impossible) and it was published free as a magazine cover disk. I was prouder of that than anything I did at work!
Iv 6y ago
That's something I encounter a lot too when wondering what tool to propose kids to start programming. I had GW-BASIC. It took two lines to draw a line on the screen. There are not a lot of things as easy nowadays
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

tomcooks 6y ago

https://kaboomjs.com/ https://kaboomjs.com/ seems a better URL

areille 6y ago
"Replit now supports KaboomJS" seems a better title
- qnsi 6y ago
  it did support replit from the start, KaboomJS was created by replit guys

gammalost 6y ago

What does bloat free mean in this case? There seems to be no explanation

laszlokorte 6y ago
Maybe boilerplate free?
- amasad 6y ago
  Yes, no boilerplate but also the library is pretty straightforward. All in this one file: https://github.com/replit/kaboom/blob/master/src/kaboom.js https://github.com/replit/kaboom/blob/master/src/kaboom.js

92g3r2ogr9asof 6y ago

Jonathan Blow is going to love this.

sublimefire 6y ago
In one of his (J.B.) talks [1] he explained how prototyping of game ideas is important. From that perspective having a platform like this helps. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISutk1mauPM&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISutk1mauPM&t=12s

ktpsns 6y ago

I love the music video for the library: https://cms.replit.com/assets/kaboom/kaboom.mp4 https://cms.replit.com/assets/kaboom/kaboom.mp4 -- can you tell me any code library which has a music video about it? That's a great way of introduction.

beansontoast 6y ago

bloat free!

itsbits 6y ago

Nice...I have used Phaser for couple of games...API looks bit similar to Phaser... Would like to understand the differences if anyone explored already?

amasad 6y ago
We love Phaser, but while possibly more powerful, we felt it's a lot more complex and harder to get started with. To demonstrate try comparing the hello world examples from Phaser vs Kaboom.

abrookewood 6y ago

OK, do yourself a favour and watch the introductory video. Probably the most unique intro I've yet to see for a programming library.

sscarduzio 6y ago
Best intro video in years
simonknoll 6y ago
thanks for the hint, it was worth watching it!
high_byte 6y ago
wasn't going to watch it. I'm glad I saw your comment
amasad 6y ago
:) fully produced in-house by our designer Tga. Song on SoundCloud too https://m.soundcloud.com/replit/kaboom https://m.soundcloud.com/replit/kaboom
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  I hope you used kaboom to create the kaboom video! Was fun to watch indeed, All the best.
r6203 6y ago
Reminds me of the Land of Lisp video—in a good way. http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  Time to port Grand Theft Wumpus (the most violent programming example ever put into a textbook) to Kaboom.js?
sunsipples 6y ago

luke2m 6y ago

This looks like a better version of scratch.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Scratch is drag-and-drop, no actual typing code, so this is quite different.

tobyhinloopen 6y ago

The video was great but the first 10 seconds of black screen is questionable. I want all libraries and frameworks to be presented this way

amasad 6y ago
Correction, its not totally black, it says “fwonky intro” xD

amasad 6y ago

Cool to see Kaboom on HN again! Kaboom is the culmination of multiple attempts at creating a game programming environment aimed at new coders. It started in 2018 when we noticed that many kids come to Replit from Scratch ready to transition from blocks to coding and get lost trying to find the best way to make games. There are many ways to make games with Replit -- pygame, html, love2d -- but based on our research there was still a big gap between the focused and intuitive experience at something like Scratch and anything that we offered at Replit. It felt like we were letting them down. We thought in order to meet their needs we needed something that satisfied the following constraints: 1. required no setup, importing modules, or any other scaffolding before you start coding 2. had powerful primitives to make something interesting in a handful of lines of code 3. simple programming model 4. easy to import and use images and other assets Our first attempt at this was a Python library called Play (https://github.com/replit/play https://github.com/replit/play). Play satisfied many of the constraints but because it was written in Python, and we execute Python on the server and stream graphics down to the client via VNC (https://blog.replit.com/native-graphics-love https://blog.replit.com/native-graphics-love), the experience wasn't uniformly good for everyone using Replit. For example, for kids in India it was really bad (since then we started replicating our servers in India and other places in the world https://blog.replit.com/global https://blog.replit.com/global). Our second attempt was a classic BASIC implementation. BASIC was easy to get started with, it had zero bloat, and you could get something on the screen quickly. Sadly, users grew out of the language really quickly. BASIC made simple things straightforward but anything slightly more advanced was hard to impossible to make. I kept trying to evolve the language until it became kind of like QBASIC (optional line numbers, labels, etc). But it felt like sisyphean task. BASIC HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052050 BASIC docs: https://docs.replit.com/misc/basic https://docs.replit.com/misc/basic Last year, around the same time I gave up on "completing" BASIC I saw a job application come in for a designer from an indie game dev Tga. Tga was not only a great designer but also an awesome programmer, so we hired him. I pitched him on this project, we started prototyping it in Replit and got something working fairly quickly (early prototypes here: https://replit.com/@gameenv https://replit.com/@gameenv). When we rolled out an alpha version the most surprising thing that happened was that people on our team got addicted to making games. We weren't the target audience, but that's always a good sign. Then kids in our community started having a lot of fun with it -- the more we tested the more conviction we had that we had a solution to the problem. The last few months we spent working on the Kaboom environment on Replit. It has an awesome asset editor, and a kick-ass debugging tools. And pretty soon we're going to have great autocomplete and intelisense. To learn more check out the following: - Kaboom blogpost: https://blog.replit.com/kaboom https://blog.replit.com/kaboom - Show HN by designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 - Repo: https://github.com/replit/kaboom https://github.com/replit/kaboom Some games from the community: - ReplJewled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled - Flappy Mark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark - Bamboo Ninja https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam - Cookie Vs Oreo https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOMOMOMOM https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOM...

foobarbecue 6y ago

On the front page twice in less than a week! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 Wonder if that's a record. /me resists urge to write a script to find out

RobKohr 6y ago
Way to dodge nerd sniping yourself :) We are at times our own worst enemy.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

alternate/main url from 6 days ago: https://kaboomjs.com/ https://kaboomjs.com/ previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774

raphaelrk 6y ago

This is such a wonderful initiative and could bring so many kids into programming! So many people start programming in order to make games and I could see this developing into the new standard for it & it being supported first class in replit makes it super simple to create and share your game. I got a chance to try out kaboom last weekend and while it's already great for games, I'd love for it to also have more support for visualizations, something I used to spend a ton of time on in high school in khanacademy's processing.js editor[1]. Kaboom's support for ES6 and WebGL, focus on gaming, and integration with replit would make it a much better tool than KA for this. Some things in particular I'd like to see from kaboom for viz - it's missing basic raw functions like drawEllipse, the docs were difficult to read (I wish it would say what params something takes instead of "[conf]"), and in the end I failed to port over my voronoi viz[2][3]. If they decide this would be a good focus for them, I'd suggest having one of the built-in kaboom examples on replit to be a visualization. [1] https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/raphaelrk/projects https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/raphaelrk/projects [2] https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/quick-voronoi/5465818696744960 https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/quick-voron... [3] https://replit.com/@raphaelrk/CumbersomeAdmiredStrategies https://replit.com/@raphaelrk/CumbersomeAdmiredStrategies

zelon88 6y ago

The addLevel() function seems especially interesting. It takes an array as input to generate the level, with each index being another row of the level. Here is the level from the linked platformer example..... " $ ", " ==== ", " ", " ^^ ", "=============",