Eniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 6, 2023

one of the reasons qbasic was so successful was because it came preinstalled on your OS and it came with everything. input, text, graphics, sound, even "music" through the PLAY command, even a built in help catalogue detailing how it all worked

the only way to get that same experience today is to use a fantasy console

Show threadAndrew
@eniko It frustrates me how close the modern browser is to being that — it supports sound, text, graphics, 3D, gamepads, even cameras and accellerometers... but it's unusable. And the JS community seem determined to make it even more complicated and then use machine learning to fix the complexity.
Jan 7, 2023 at 12:52pmWeb
Show threadEniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 7, 2023
@andrewt yeah, and even if you make something that works consistently across major browsers and apis now, there's no telling when some browser regression will introduce issues. Ask me how I know :/
Show threadAndrewJan 7, 2023
@eniko I think there could be a good fantasy console like library to wrap all this stuff but you'd still have to download that, and an editor and... It'd need a whole ide bundling in to really work. That could be cool though, like build a game in this app and it'll run on anything with a browser (ps, pls keep this one dependency up to date to make sure it keeps working, sorry)
Show threadEniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 7, 2023
@andrewt I mean if you take something like pico 8 or tic 80 you basically get that (since they have a web export)
Show threadAndrewJan 7, 2023
@eniko yeah, I really like pico8. But I'd like to also have something with a similar design that let me use the whole computer — not every project works with a two-button gamepad in 128×128 with harsh CPU limits. I mean I realise the old Basic systems had similar limitations but there's no reason we *have to* now.
Show threadEniko (moved ➡ gamedev.place)Jan 7, 2023
@andrewt yeah. Fair. I've dreamed of making something like that myself but time/energy/money...