[cableshaft]

Pico-8 is fun to play with, and I do recommend giving it a try, I half-ported one of my games to it (some day I'll get around to finishing and releasing it).

But if you're coming from a web background you might have better luck with something like Phaser 3 and Typescript. You get to keep a lot of the same structure and toolset that you're likely used to in modern web development, while still able to make good looking 2D games (not just be limited to 8-bit looking games) that you can put online and send a link to friends so they can play and enjoy it.

For games I'm not putting on the web, my main framework of choice nowadays is Monogame. It's C#/.net based like Unity, but open source. It doesn't have quite as large of a community as Unity, but it's still in active development and some major indie games have been developed using it. It doesn't have a drag and drop editor like Unity, and I'm running into a few recent issues with 3D in other platforms (that look like they might be addressed in a development build already, I haven't dug too deep into it yet)

But the framework is battle-tested from the Microsoft XNA days and there's no proprietary editors with ugly messy scene code that doesn't merge well (at least from what I remember working in Unity a while back). I can just focus on the code.

But maybe not great starting off point. I still recommend taking a look at Phaser 3.