Hi, I'm new to gave development (but not development in general), and I want to build a simple game for kids where one can talk and interact with a character (or characters) in different scenarios. For example, a character can be a Rabbit Bunny who invites the player to go on a hike through the forest, collect some food they find and decide if it edible or not.

The thing that makes this game special is that it's going to have a voice UI i.e. the player only interacts using his voice. Another things is that it needs to run in a browser. I'm at the stage when I need to choose an animation/game engine that will work in any browser (or at least Google Chrome/Chromium/WebKit).

I did my home work but couldn't find anything which isn't as massive as Unity and the likes of it (as I need really simple things and some minimum of animation, at this stage at least).

Could someone recommend an engine that:

• Is easy to learn
• Has good browser support
• Can be used for simple 2D animations
• Ideally is free

Anyone?

No AI, no collision. Why need an engine? I basically hate pre-rendered stuff, but if your game is really intrinsically 2d (no shading of a bump-map, no rotation other then z) most of it can be done using HTML and CSS.
I do not know about sound (in or out).

there are lots of html5 game libraries. the most popular are pixi and phaser. my personal preference is cocos creator though, if you like a middleware like unity but less complicated.

you can find lots of code around to access the microphone from javascript, it's kind of independent of the game library you use.

I think Phaser is the best for 2D browser games for mobile support. It is the most popular 2D game framework in the World. You can use it from JavaScript but everyone recommend to use TypeScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript

Phaser - A fast, fun and free open source HTML5 game framework

Desktop and Mobile HTML5 game framework. A fast, free and fun open source framework for Canvas and WebGL powered browser games.

alex9 said:
which isn't as massive as Unity

If you plan to make browser games for websites you cannot run Unity WebGL build on mobile devices. You can but only on a few of them: Unity is one of the best for standalone applications.

WebGL Browser Compatibility
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/webgl-building.html
Unity WebGL supports all major desktop browsers to some degree. However, the level of support and the expected performance varies between different browsers. See the table below for an overview of browser features of interest to Unity WebGL content, and which browsers support them.

Note that Unity WebGL content is not currently supported on mobile devices. It may still work, especially on high-end devices, but many current devices are not powerful enough and don’t have enough memory to support Unity WebGL content well. For this reason, Unity WebGL shows a warning message when trying to load content on mobile browsers (which can be disabled if needed).