Honestly a little bit hesitant to say anything yet. There are a few more features to add, and a whole lot more work to be done to showcase just how cool it is. But the short version is, I'm working on a sort of meta-pico8, a game maker for WebGL2 2d pixel art games (e.g. 320x180 games like Animal Well) that runs in the browser, but one that's firstly collaborative, so that we can all build it together. And some of the coolest features are the based around that. For example, I got arbitrary imports of user code working in the browser, so all you have to do is create an account, add a JS file, and other people can import it as if it were a built-in module, and it just works. Plus the SDK I ended up making is simple, and the API is clean, and there's a few innovations in the GUI layer that I'm excited to share. I wish I could explain just how cool this is.
Interesting, I have been working on a similar project, albeit 320x240.
I also got some code-share and collaboration features working, but got a bit stuck on fonts. But I can appreciate your feeling of 'how cool this is'
I ground to a halt once I realised I had no barrier to entry, ie it could be cloned very easily. Always an issue with Web Development I guess. Plus I hate what modern browsers have become in recent years and not sure I want to target such a fast moving platform. I got burned once already with WebStart 'warning this app might do something scary' and certificate fiasco.
I thought about some native binaries, but I know I am kidding myself. I had an ios app that was pixel cloned within 6 months. But somehow a web app feels like publishing straight into public domain.
It's not just the web, native apps have always had free open source clones that technically render them useless, often just as good quality, yet they didn't go out of business. There are other considerations people make when deciding to use an app, including network effect, a strong community, sheer level of quality and passion from the developers, etc.
For fonts, I just went with a simple raster bitmap font and pixel grid storage format. Creating these limitations makes it easier for me and for developers and artists. I choose 320x180 because it fits the 16:9 perfectly, which would make full screen ideal on most monitors.
