Plain old js / html / CSS felt the most ... 'free.' For incremental games especially, where you can get by with very limited of textures, animations, or complex systems like physics etc, it can be nice to only have what you need. You're not tinkering around with any things you don't really understand the inner workings of - and everything is yours from the ground up.
Building on top of that - a framework can be nice to abstract away a lot of tedious verbosity of building your site element by element or just reactivity in general. Tbh, playing around with incremental games is what introduced me to Vue - and I reach for Vue 90% of the time I touch JS anymore. Profectus / TMT led me to Vue when I lacked enough basic JS (let alone vue) skills to actually make use of them, so I worked backwards from there and unfortunately never really made it back to Profectus - though I intend to eventually.
Most recently - Godot as well. The more i get to know the engine, the more I like it. Its true that you don't "need" an engine because a lot of incrementals are so simple - but since most can export to opengl / html5 theres not really a downside, and you're building a skillset that will translate to larger game projects if you ever choose to go that way. Was actually considering throwing together some simple Godot 4 tutorials to stick up on this site as it feels like a great venue for it, despite that being a blind-leading-the-blind type situation.
I've tried a few different things.
Plain old js / html / CSS felt the most ... 'free.' For incremental games especially, where you can get by with very limited of textures, animations, or complex systems like physics etc, it can be nice to only have what you need. You're not tinkering around with any things you don't really understand the inner workings of - and everything is yours from the ground up.
Building on top of that - a framework can be nice to abstract away a lot of tedious verbosity of building your site element by element or just reactivity in general. Tbh, playing around with incremental games is what introduced me to Vue - and I reach for Vue 90% of the time I touch JS anymore. Profectus / TMT led me to Vue when I lacked enough basic JS (let alone vue) skills to actually make use of them, so I worked backwards from there and unfortunately never really made it back to Profectus - though I intend to eventually.
Most recently - Godot as well. The more i get to know the engine, the more I like it. Its true that you don't "need" an engine because a lot of incrementals are so simple - but since most can export to opengl / html5 theres not really a downside, and you're building a skillset that will translate to larger game projects if you ever choose to go that way. Was actually considering throwing together some simple Godot 4 tutorials to stick up on this site as it feels like a great venue for it, despite that being a blind-leading-the-blind type situation.