Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
Two, surely? The previous one still being used and the new one being written.
(Note that this is how most rendering artifacts were fixed long ago - the on screen and the off screen buffers were swapped, so nobody would "see" in progress scenes)
I wonder if that's a similar mental state you have while lucid dreaming or just after waking up. You feel like you have all of the answers and struggle to write them down before your brain wipes them out.
miniKanren was my introduction to relational programming (SQL aside!), and I had hours of trying to wrap my head around the Reasoned Schemer.
Were you aware a miniKanren-inspired language was the foundation of a large chunk of Amazon's retail data aggregation stack? I'm no longer there, but it might be one of the larger deployments out there. We spent many many hours trying to figure out the best way to run the relational engine at scale and with acceptable performance.
To be clear, it's not Jagex you're competing with. It's the 20+ other indie MMO solo developers who are trying to do the same thing as you, including but not limited to: RetroMMO, New Eden, Valorbound, Carth, Eterspire, Omuri, Shadefell, Cookie Dragon, Cinis, Cinderstone, Legends of Etherell, Legendarium, Mirage Realms, Aether Story, Ethyrial, and so on. There's more that come and go every month.
Unfortunately, the #1 lesson that I've learned is that while nostalgia gets some reception, there's a reason no big companies are really making MMOs, even at a smaller scale. There's just not that large a viable market for them.
Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!
Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.
From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)
Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.
I built Genfanad (http://genfanad.com/) as a browser based game with similar inspirations to yours a few years ago. A lot of the technologies you mentioned are very similar. It's surprising how easy getting something up and running is these days!
We ended up shutting down a few months ago as I couldn't figure out how to take it to profitability. Do you have plans for that, or is it just a fun side project?
The lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.
There's physical Amazon Fresh stores in the Seattle area (at least) which has the just-walk-out technology. I tried the one in Factoria out and it was ... interesting. A lot of groceries were pre-packaged but it had most things that I was looking for.
Felt like a "scaled-up" convenience store. Not having a line was very nice.
I don't believe this is much of a secret. A lot of internal services have been gradually shifted over the past couple years, there was a re:Invent talk this year about it.
Incidentally, when I was looking for an animator for a short animated segment for an indie game trailer, it took many many months of searching.
There's a few companies that do it as part of a fully-fledged package to produce video (at hundreds to thousands of dollars per second) but surprisingly the same glut of people looking to break into the industry (like art, modeling, composing) are not very discoverable.