Kaboom.js, the game library that I loved

So, maybe if you know me, you know I worked with Kaboom.js for a long time, like 3 years. I was an annoying child bothering the creator of the library, then I was a community manager, then a mantainer of the library, and now I’m just a user.

That’s because Kaboom ended their development. It was a sad day, so I want to remember what was my journey with Kaboom.

Kabooms

I remember the first time that I saw Kaboom.js, I was using some other tools like Love2D, Phaser and Unity, but them wasn’t very intuitive for me, I was a beginner.

Kaboom had a simply API, probably the simplest API I ever saw, and I loved it. After that, I made my first games, games that you can find on Newgrounds.com.

I was simply doing my games, Aspace for example, a game where you need to avoid the trash destroying them.

If someone asks me how Kaboom felt, I would send them this video:

By the way, I learned how to play this song in Ukelele. Here’s the tabs.

Me and Kaboom

Using the library I found some suck points, my first issue was about the text wrapping.

And my feature request was approved and added to the library. Was epic, it was probably one of my first issues in a open source project.

Then I found more bugs, and I opened more issues.

In that time, I was probably the only one using the master branch in my projects, and I found a lot of bugs in the library, is probably the most bugged thing that I never used in my life, but I loved it.

Simply to use, I was being so productive, I was making games in a week, in a month, and yes they were simple games, but I was learning a lot, having fun and doing something that from child was my dream, make games.

Then I started experimenting with plugins in the library, there’s one of the first plugins that I made:

Yes! rgb() only accepted values from 0 to 1, and I wanted to use the values from 0 to 255, so I made a plugin to do that, because I thonk about tga doing much work, and personally I don’t wanted to wait for him to do that.

Some time later, I opened many issues, #132, #138, #112, and my first PR, adding an example dthe egg example. (Yes, like the peppa pig game)

Being a community manager

Kaboom was growing, and I was growing with it. After time I got involved with tga, and I “founded” the Kaboom Community in a Discord Server, I was a moderator there, and I was always helping the new members. Even some of the contributors of the new fork was introduced to Kaboom by me.

In that time the community was like 30 persons, tga released Kaboom 2000.0.0

The community grew up a lot, we reached 100 members in the Discord Server.

That way was one of my other projects, MarkBot, a Discord Bot for the Kaboom Server.

From being a moderator, I organized game jams. It was the Mark Jam, created in response to the community’s desire for more jams, even after Replit held their “KAJAM.” I took the initiative and made it happen.

Yes, there was a #1, #2, #3 and #4, but the MarkJam #5 was the one with most participants, 12 games! It was a great jam, and I was very happy with the results of it.

I was selected as a Replit Rep to do community events, and I did a lot of workshops about Kaboom, even a livestream teaching the basics of Kaboom in Spanish. It was my first livestream, and I was very nervous. It is still online, it embarrasses me a lot, but I’m proud of it.

Then I also worked in Replit as an intern, to do the 3000 version. I was very happy to contribute to tga’s project, and I was very happy to see the community grow.

With the time, I realized that tga was a kind of mentor for me. Much of the things that I do in code, even today, I learned from him. I’m very grateful for that. From here, I want to say thank you, tga.

The art

I’m not a good artist, but I tried to make some art for my games, and I made also the art of Kaboom v3000, in special the logo.

Yes I know, it’s not a good art, but I tried my best. After that I did the logo that you see in the Kaboom website.

I also made some of the art sprites, like my famous egg, now that old example looks like this:

A new journey

With Kaboom, I knew a lot of people, I learned a lot of things, I made a lot of games, and I had a lot of fun. But all good things come to an end, and Kaboom was no different.

One day, I known that Replit stopped the Kaboom.js development. I was sad, but I understood. Now is my turn.

When I was a child, I loved to read books about Dinosaurs, I was fascinated by them, the Argentinosaurus, the T-Rex, the Triceratops, all of them, and I had many books about them.

Actually, I don’t read much about them anymore, but now I code and develop games, probably a worse destiny than extinction, but I like it.

Then, I started a new fork of Kaboom, KAPLAY. Now it has more than 100 stars on GitHub and many new features.

I’m very happy with the results of it, and I’m very happy with the community that we are building around it. Sometimes I wrote Kaboom instead of KAPLAY and that makes me sad sometimes.

But now I have to work hard in KAPLAY, so it can grow and follow what Kaboom was for me, a fun and easy library to make games.

I hope you like KAPLAY.

Thank you, “lajbel”.