Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

replit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#41

Post by amasad »

laszlokorte wrote: post #12
gammalost wrote: post #6

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

Maybe boilerplate free?

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

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#42

Post by amasad »

lrmunoz wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#44

Post by tartoran »

megablast wrote: post #20
grenoire wrote: post #4

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…

Hahaha. I had a z80 processor and 16kb. I wish I had OpenGL.

For a 8-9 year old OpenGl is too much. I started with z80 too and was making crappy games but it was fun. All these simplistic game making frameworks are a great resource for young people and the simplicity is welcome even at more advanced levels. Sometimes you just want to be at high level and concentrate on the whats of the game not the hows.

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#45

Post by tartoran »

harry8 wrote: post #39
Iv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Python implementation of logo turtle graphics in the standard library: https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html Isn't a terrible option for that sort of thing.

Logo is great in whichever form. And great for kids as well, the concepts are very easy to grasp at a young age

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#46

Post by ArtWomb »

amasad wrote: post #38

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 th…

Terrific for teaching gamedev to K-12!

But I can't believe you missed the opportunity to implement (Activision) Kaboom ;)

https://archive.org/details/a8b_Kaboom_1983_Activision_US_k_...

Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment

#48

Post by mlok »

bemmu wrote: post #9
grenoire wrote: post #4

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…

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.

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 !
Post reply on HN