I'm biased (I wrote a book on it: https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/html5-games-novice-t...), but JavaScript is great for making games: certainly no game engine required, and runs everywhere. Just make a loop that runs 60 times a second, then draw images to canvas!
I personally like making things from scratch to understand every aspect - but I think the "fantasy consoles" really give the best feeling of the good-ol' BASIC days. I love Pico-8. It costs (not much) money, but the creator invented the genre of fantasy console and I think has the best "vision". There are some others that are more feature-rich and open source (Tic-80 is a popular one).
If I'm just prototyping an idea or just want to muck around, I'll do it in Pico-8. If I want to make something bigger and more serious, I do it in JavaScript with my own libraries and code (for 3D I'll use Three.js or roll-my-own WebGL - like this "from-scratch minecraft clone": https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels).
I'm biased (I wrote a book on it: https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/html5-games-novice-t...), but JavaScript is great for making games: certainly no game engine required, and runs everywhere. Just make a loop that runs 60 times a second, then draw images to canvas!
I personally like making things from scratch to understand every aspect - but I think the "fantasy consoles" really give the best feeling of the good-ol' BASIC days. I love Pico-8. It costs (not much) money, but the creator invented the genre of fantasy console and I think has the best "vision". There are some others that are more feature-rich and open source (Tic-80 is a popular one).
If I'm just prototyping an idea or just want to muck around, I'll do it in Pico-8. If I want to make something bigger and more serious, I do it in JavaScript with my own libraries and code (for 3D I'll use Three.js or roll-my-own WebGL - like this "from-scratch minecraft clone": https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels).