I've been teaching myself front-end web development for the past 11 months, and have spent the last 3.5 months of that working on this game as a portfolio piece to hopefully land myself a job as a developer. It is coded entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so it's technically a webpage, just presented in the form of a game. For anyone interested in a more detailed explanation of how things work I did a pretty long writeup over on /r/webdev. I had tons of fun with it, and what started out as a simple Number Munchers clone to learn programming turned into a pretty awesome little game with way more content and features than I thought I was capable of doing by myself.
I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and it was the most challenging thing I've ever done, but it was absolutely worth it to learn the skills I'll need to get myself a better job to provide a better life for my son. I've gotten a lot of PM's recently from people asking about my process, and asking for advice on coding, so if anyone else is interested, please send me a PM and I'll do my best to help out in any way that I can!