OK, do yourself a favour and watch the introductory video. Probably the most unique intro I've yet to see for a programming library.
:) fully produced in-house by our designer Tga. Song on SoundCloud too https://m.soundcloud.com/replit/kaboom
Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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…
Its been a while that I did somehing with python - but shouldn't event handlers work pretty much the same? Or in other words, how can eventhandlers work any other way than asynchronous?
And you need eventhandlers for games.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#33OK, do yourself a favour and watch the introductory video. Probably the most unique intro I've yet to see for a programming library.
Reminds me of the Land of Lisp video—in a good way.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#34This looks like a better version of scratch.
Scratch is drag-and-drop, no actual typing code, so this is quite different.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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…
In node, nearly all of the stuff has sync versions and global await is around the corner.
For every other saner environment (read: browser consoles), global await is a thing already, and you get immediate feedback, and have a canvas (with sync APIs!).
That being said, I do think that the best programming language to start learning is the one your parents/friends speak.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#36It 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…
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.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#37I 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…
There was Click and Create, I recall having some fun with that back in the day, with very little coding (none really)
I used click and create and others by clickteam very heavily growing up. Paved the way for making games very heavily for me.
Wish that methodology was still around, you could do a lot with it.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#38Cool 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). 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), 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).
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
BASIC docs: 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). 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
- Show HN by designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26728774
- Repo: https://github.com/replit/kaboom
Some games from the community:
- ReplJewled https://replit.com/@ConnorBrewster/ReplJeweled
- Flappy Mark https://replit.com/@slmjkdbtl/flappymark
- Bamboo Ninja https://replit.com/@RoBlockHead/KaboomJam
- Cookie Vs Oreo https://replit.com/@Coder100/COOKIE-VS-OREOS-KABOOMJS-BOOMOM...
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#39I 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…
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.
Re: Kaboom – JavaScript game programming library and environment
#40Nice...I have used Phaser for couple of games...API looks bit similar to Phaser... Would like to understand the differences if anyone explored already?
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.