The all-in-one nature of most fantasy consoles is really appealing. They are also not terribly opinionated, which can be nice. When I tried Unity its 2d story was not good and I kind of struggled with its opinions. I've heard that its 2d has improved, but haven't had the time to explore it since.
I actually do like reasonably low resolutions in-game rather than in the code editor. When I play with my kids I want it to feel like good graphics aren't too far out of reach, and low-res makes it easier to get to something in the range of acceptable. My own kids appreciate their own pixel art more than anything they do in Scratch, for example.
I also think I might be slightly younger than most fantasy console fans, maybe? When I was very young I had an Apple IIc, which was good for booting straight to BASIC, but most of my childhood programming occurred in the era that spanned from CGA cards to VGA, and then I left programming for a while when 3d acceleration became a thing. One quirk of this era was that tradeoffs between color depth and resolution were just a normal thing. So for me, it would be a natural thing for a retro game dev environment that simulated a fixed framebuffer size to support, say, a 256x192 256 color mode and a 512x384 4 color mode. An editor in that higher-resolution, low-color mode would be way more comfortable than in low-res. (Pico-8 does have an alternate resolution, but it's 64x64 and still 16 color- somewhat evocative of the old 40x40 mode that Apples had).
TIC-80 does almost, um, tic all my boxes. I mostly just want a higher-resolution code editing mode (for both me and my kids) and a static language (for me; my kids don't really have a notion of types (yet)). So obviously the solution is to fork TIC-80 and see what I can make it do...
I actually do like reasonably low resolutions in-game rather than in the code editor. When I play with my kids I want it to feel like good graphics aren't too far out of reach, and low-res makes it easier to get to something in the range of acceptable. My own kids appreciate their own pixel art more than anything they do in Scratch, for example.
I also think I might be slightly younger than most fantasy console fans, maybe? When I was very young I had an Apple IIc, which was good for booting straight to BASIC, but most of my childhood programming occurred in the era that spanned from CGA cards to VGA, and then I left programming for a while when 3d acceleration became a thing. One quirk of this era was that tradeoffs between color depth and resolution were just a normal thing. So for me, it would be a natural thing for a retro game dev environment that simulated a fixed framebuffer size to support, say, a 256x192 256 color mode and a 512x384 4 color mode. An editor in that higher-resolution, low-color mode would be way more comfortable than in low-res. (Pico-8 does have an alternate resolution, but it's 64x64 and still 16 color- somewhat evocative of the old 40x40 mode that Apples had).
TIC-80 does almost, um, tic all my boxes. I mostly just want a higher-resolution code editing mode (for both me and my kids) and a static language (for me; my kids don't really have a notion of types (yet)). So obviously the solution is to fork TIC-80 and see what I can make it do...