I’m not sure why nobody is suggesting the engine that most of itch games use but

Love 2D

Really good engine for game jams as well! Offers loads of freedom while being fast and having a lot of lua libraries to make things like menus just a 10 line thing.

Small, well kept engines like this are the answer. You can of course write your own or build tooling on a bigger engine like unity, but if you just want a quick solution something like Love or Phaser is the way to go.

PICO-8 for really small ones.

TIC-80 for slightly larger ones.

Maybe Picotron in the future for yet larger ones. [1]

There's an open market niche for an integrated editor like the abovementioned but without arbitrary restrictions (of resolution, color palette, etc.), that isn't quite as big as say Unity or Godot. Noone has made this yet. But since the space exists between multiple efforts from both ends of the scale, it'll be filled soon enough.

Even I've considered making it, but have too many projects on my plate.

Game Maker gets an honorable mention, but it's pretty trash these days since the original author sold it.

[1] https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

> fastest way

Probably with whatever programming language you are currently best at. Virtually every modern language has a quick happy path to the web.

More specifically, those skilled in HTML/JS/CSS (and particularly WebGL) can do a shitload of damage on first order terms. E.g. everything inlined into single index.html file out on Github Pages. Doesn't get much faster than that.

If you have a little bit more time, you can investigate some systems-level programming options. I can provide a solid recommendation for C#/.NET. Blazor in particular is a really compelling way to put the type system of C# on top of your web components. For a "dumb small" game, the expressiveness of C# 8.0+ might be a bit overkill, but it is still really fucking nice to have all the same. If you want 100% functional UI you can just pull that lever whenever you are ready. Also, operating with Blazor in server-side mode would enable very trivial and responsive multiplayer experiences (assuming participants are near the server). This approach could be compelling for settings like corporate, campus, event, private LAN, etc.

This game and many others are made using Unity.

It uses C# but compiles to web too, and has a very complete (if clunky) toolset.

Importantly, as compared with some of the alternatives, it can be used with very little actual programming, since it has a visual editor for levels, UI, animations, and whatnot.

as someone whose day job is making games in Unity, it is a bit finnicky for larger projects, but for this kind of scope it is perfectly adequate!

Phaser perhaps? http://phaser.io/

I have used phaser. It's the best framework for writing js games quick. But it's not as cool as flash was.

Also Check Flixel or rather Haxe. I never was a fan of flash, but damn Haxe makes it easy to write something that looks same on every device

Nim + sdl2 + wasm works ...

I should probably put my stupid maze generator somewhere so I could link to it.

Might be helpful - https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/how-to-publish-for-webgl

They asked for small and not 100mb overhead ;)

I think Godot is a good choice for something like this. HTML5 exports are easy to do.