Hi! My name is tga and I'm the author of kaboom.js. I'm working at replit and this is part of the effort of us trying to make game dev more accessible to beginners & intermediate programmers.

Kaboom is like a summary of me trying to learn game dev. There're a lot of tools and most of them tend to get bloaty as they go on, they often require complicated setups and hard to really for beginners to really get started, one goal of kaboom is to allow beginners to get a game up and running with no effort and start enjoying the game dev fun right away.

Using Js is because I want it to run natively on browser, also it seems like the "go-to" beginner language right now, but I'm also thinking about making Kaboom Native where it uses QuickJS + platform native APIs (thinking sokol for that) to run on native platforms, so you can write your game in Js once and run on every platform natively (so unlike other cross platform engines, it doesn't require emscripten / WASM on web)

Inspired by fantasy consoles, there's also a special editor on replit that enables you code and manage / create assets in the same environment, check it out! https://replit.com/kaboom (still in early dev)

Ask me anything!