oh gosh(!!!) please make your sketches in the wick editor - a drawing program that also is a game engine, it’s the spiritual successor to making Flash-style games in any of Adobe’s programs. it’ll make those four months into four weeks or less for your next games since you’re already an artist and there is no moving art assets into a game engine then positioning everything… just click your sketch and add code to it, now your sketch is interactable and can move around.
i say sketch and technically speaking it can be called a symbol (Flash terminology), a clip (Wick terminology), meanwhile your keyframe can have many of those- and your timeline can have many layers thereby many keyframes. it makes sense if you’ve ever animated something. if not, then it’s easy to pick up as an artist! moreso than straight up needing to code everything >w<
i also adore how clean everything gets! one ‘clip’ can contain an entire timeline full of layers and keyframes of it’s own, then that can contain more ‘clips’! for clip-ception! it just makes organizing my animations, interactives, games surmountable..! i’m not one for keeping tidy AND making stuff happen… it’s one or the other with me hehe. welp keeping my intro-screen confined to one keyframe helps, then my main menu in keyframe 2, stage 1 in keyframe 3, etc. until like my GAME OVER screen is shown in keyframe 5 (if i just doodle a short game in a day!)
it’s all doable because, well, it’s like that matroska doll. inside my doodle is an entire timeline dedicated for my doodle. the first and most useful piece of code is ‘stop()’ which just stops the main timeline from playing. instead clicking a doodle with my mouse triggers ‘goto(2)’ and now the game moves from keyframe one to keyframe 2 with whatever doodles and menues and text i put there. of the main timeline. so my timeline is heccin’ clean! the nested timelines are kept dedicated! i find my code for my player character by… literally clicking the doodle that looks like my player character, then to the right in the editor is the SCRIPTS section- it’s also really graphical with code! it’s like… i can just fuck around and make a game that plays AND learn coding WHILE seeing progress.
Wick editor is F(ree) L(ibre) O(pen) S(ource) S(oftware), which means it’s everyone’s, everytime, everywhere !!! you can download it and export your game into one single .html5 file directly - ofcourse no accounts, no subscriptions, no nothing. if you’re a programmer and want to edit the game engine or the editor- it’s incredibly small and all written in javascript! you can go in there and dig around, if you’re a programmer! i’m not!