Yesterday I published a minigame I made in JavaScript following the ideas of my 7yo son. He drew most of the graphics –I gave him a hand with the slimes’ sprites–, and I had never made a twin stick shooter type of game, so that was interesting. I haven’t played any games on the genre either, and I think I understand now why they can be very fun!
It was a good exercise to use my JavaScript codebase with canvas 2D that I put together in 2023 refreshing my knowledge of the language with the new shiny bits from ECMAScript 2016, that didn’t exist –or I wasn’t aware of them– when I made some web games back in 2014, like Flax.
It is still more like a tech demo, but playable –and kind of fun for 10 minutes–, and it helped me to make some improvements on the “engine”. The development experience was OK, but the bits I don’t like about JavaScript are still there, including the hit and miss performance of canvas 2D on Linux.
I don’t see myself writing larger games in JavaScript, but for small prototypes or jam games –if I was still doing jams!–, it could be a good match.
The source is available js-twin-shooter.