:) Yeah, the "awesome project, terrible product" idea you're expressing has crossed my mind many times. It's an interesting line to try and walk to be sure.
Care to share more on the research you did? I'd love to hear more.
While I'm not a stranger server-side languages, the last decade of my career has been mostly building CRUD apps with JavaScript. So, I initially tried building out this simulation using React + PixiJS. I ran into performance issues with React's reconciler pretty quickly. That, plus no real modern, 2D JavaScript game engine (BabylonJS for 3D .. PhaserJS for 2D?) made me look elsewhere.
My intention is to build a web-first game not a steam-first game because I see focused interaction with the game being just a couple of minutes each day, but brief check-ups on the game state to occur repeatedly throughout the day. I don't think those use cases align with how I see myself using Steam. Usually Steam is a sit down and game for an hour sort of thing.
Assuming web-first is a priority, but avoiding JS, the only option is WASM. I did some reading around and saw suggestions to avoid using GC'ed languages because JavaScript's GC is one mark against it already and because stuffing a GC into a WASM build makes it very heavy.
Those decisions sort of naturally pushed me into Rust/Bevy for better or worse!
