You should look into “A Curious Expedition”, which is a commercially successful Steam game based on web tech [0].
You will most likely have to use JavaScript, on the front end. You can do a lot of neat graphical tricks these days - whether with Canvas, SVG’s, or above-my-pay-grade wizardry.
What kind of back end engineer are you? Just curious since it sounds like you don’t have a plan for multiplayer networking yet. Knowing what your skills are would help determine what advice you need.
Edit: additionally, if you want to have a better time writing JavaScript, you can use Gulp [1] and BabelJS [2] to compile ES6 into backwards-compatible JS. Gulp is also helpful for streamlining other painful parts of web development - worth reading through the docs.
Regarding multiplayer, it depends on how you plan to network. I am not sure how people implement P2P networks these days. However, you could probably use TCP/IP sockets (AF_INET) to take data from the client side and send it to a central process (you will need asynchronous IO and you will probably want to connect to the socket using JavaScript / web sockets). You could use a sock file (AF_UNIX) to move data between different languages/scripts if you want to, as well.
You will most likely have to use JavaScript, on the front end. You can do a lot of neat graphical tricks these days - whether with Canvas, SVG’s, or above-my-pay-grade wizardry.
What kind of back end engineer are you? Just curious since it sounds like you don’t have a plan for multiplayer networking yet. Knowing what your skills are would help determine what advice you need.
Edit: additionally, if you want to have a better time writing JavaScript, you can use Gulp [1] and BabelJS [2] to compile ES6 into backwards-compatible JS. Gulp is also helpful for streamlining other painful parts of web development - worth reading through the docs.
Regarding multiplayer, it depends on how you plan to network. I am not sure how people implement P2P networks these days. However, you could probably use TCP/IP sockets (AF_INET) to take data from the client side and send it to a central process (you will need asynchronous IO and you will probably want to connect to the socket using JavaScript / web sockets). You could use a sock file (AF_UNIX) to move data between different languages/scripts if you want to, as well.
There is a very good intro to multiplayer networking here: https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_t...
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17080985
[1]: https://gulpjs.com/
[2]: https://github.com/babel/gulp-babel/blob/master/README.md