The browser game is called Stardrift Empires Nova.

I'd like to hear suggestions on how to design a game just like this, for my own personal use; maybe share for free with a few friends. It's such a simple concept with no animation, just clicking on pictures basically.

Should I try to search for a generic template similar to this and learn how to modify it? Or should I teach myself a scripting language? I don't know what language is being used for the back end. There's obviously some sort of database, and possibly some PHP scripts to make it work? HTML and CSS is no problem for me, and neither is the artwork. It's just the actual mechanics of getting the game to work. What coding is likely being used?

I just want to modify it and add my own ships, technologies to research, my own artwork, etc. If there was a hack for this it would be pretty awesome but I'm guessing I'm going to have to design my own from the ground up.

Suggestions would be appreciated.

There's plenty of browser-games that, you know, have had their time and got canceled, maybe their programming is still obtainable somewhere.

There are indeed a ton of games that look like this out there.

Most are now defunct, as it's extremely hard to keep it viable from a hosting standpoint and monetization perspective.

The concept has been ported to a number of platforms such as Kongregate and Facebook and is sometimes included in the concept of social games nowadays.

The best approach to these types of games (and most profitable) was probably developed by Kixeye, but I'm not particularly versed on their specific creation (something to do with sea and pirates).

You could look into them and see what makes their game so fun (because their community is quite vocal about the fact this is the best game in the genre).