I just read http://buildnewgames.com/real-time-multiplayer/ which explains the fundamentals and bets practices to build a massive real time multiplayer html5 game. My question is however given the “simplicity” of the game I need to build (simple kind of scratch game where you find or not something behind a tile), do I really need complex tools (canvas or node.js for example) ?

The game

The gamestakes place with a picture of our office as a background (tilemap). For HR purpose, we wish to create the following game fore employees: each day they can come to the website and click on a certain number of tiles (3 max per day) and find behind it motivation advice and interesting facts about the company.

The constraints and rules

• the screen is divided into isometric 2D square tiles. There are basically an image (photograph of our office)
• number of tiles on the screen game: about 10,000 to much more (with scroll , see below)
• the players can scroll in 4 directions
• there are only 2 types of tiles: already open and closed
• player can open tiles that have not been yet open by other players
• there is no path for players : any player can click on any tile on the screen at any moment (if it’s not already done by another player)
• 2 players can’t be on the same tile at the same moment (or if they can, I’ll have to manage to see which one clicked on it first)
• only one type of player (all with similar roles), no weapon, no internal score… very simple game.
• no complex physics (collision only occurs if 2 players are on the same tile)

The target I need to achieve:

• cross device, cross browsers
• high performance reaction (subsecond reactions)
• average nb of players per hour: up to 10K players per hour (quite high indeed but it’s because we aim at proving our case for the game to our business unit)

So what I would like to know:

• 2D Tiled map: Do I need tiledmapeditor or can I enable me split the screen like here ?
• should I use canvas or plain html/css could be sufficient for my need?
• do I need a game engine/framework such as melon.js or crafty./js ? (even if the game play is extremely basic, I do need mouse and touché device support, mouse emulations on touch devices…) or ca I easily/quickly do it without?
• for my constraints and targets, should I use CPU acceleration ?
• for my constraints and targets, should I use web workers ?
• for the database, for a massively real time game should I avoid to put the current locations of player in MySQL as i feel it might slow me down. What kind of DB should I implement ?

Thanks for your help !