All my games here use custom engines, but Upsy-Downsy is the first using Pebble. And will probably be the last too; I’ve decided I don’t quite like it, and I’m planning the next one.
(also, if you’re curious, a lot of my pre-Itch games are on https://aksommerville.com/ , with even more custom low-level fun!)
Nothing here uses Emscripten or SDL. I try hard to use the absolute minimum of dependencies, usually only platform I/O drivers (eg ALSA, X11, PulseAudio…), and of course on the Web there’s none of that :)
No scripting languages either. My feeling there is if you want the convenience of an interpretted language, we already get Javascript for free, so use that. Too Heavy is in Javascript. Cool thing about Wasm though, it doesn’t have to be C at the source. C++, Rust, Zig, Go… in theory they should all work. Maybe I’ll dust off my 1980’s Pascal skills someday and write a web game in that ;)
The easiest thing is to write in Javascript, and then the only homemade thing you need is the bundling logic. Or just use Webpack or whatever. Standard browser APIs really do all the work for you. TBH I’m not even sure what the high-level frameworks are for, when targetting web!