The challenge of remoting this project is that it’s very mechanical, and could go several ways - often a personal preference if the developer.
Basics - whether you use direct pin inputs or shift-registers... maintain a constant background process that scans and tracks all the input pins. (longer wire runs may require some conditioning - hence the thought about serial)
This will give you near-real-time strike status. (Also worth considering a sync clock between nodes if they are used... to enhance ‘pulse’ style effects.)
Then you probably need to build an array of timers and time constants to manage every possible output.
Now comes the tricky bit (depends on the hardware interfaces)...
You have to calculate on/off or PWM decay level for every channel, and output that against the continuously running timer values.
Having a local serial coprocessor may also help, as each local cpu will have its own pwm outputs- to drive the drivers.
As you can see, there are a lot of options, and the project needs to be ‘designed’ to get the best results. It could look great, and easily become a saleable product if it’s easy for others to retrofit.
Ask the mods to bump this over to Gigs and Collaborations - put Canada in the title, you may get lucky with winter coming!