The actual scope needed for a playable prototype is generally on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code, possibly less when you rely on a fr

The actual scope needed for a playable prototype is generally on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand lines of code, possibly less when you rely on a framework to take care of the low-level details. You do need a little bit more CS background than web programming to get far, but not a huge amount - if that's the barrier try some introductory CS courses, those were a big turning point for me.