AMamasad·Apr 13, 2021
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 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 h
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andful 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...