Don't you still need many of the techniques taught in this class to build something like that? The material doesn't look inherently targeted at low-level languages or machine-code as a target.
Front end is lexing, parsing, building the AST (in whole or just keeping pieces of it around), semantic analysis. When that is done, you can say "Yup, valid program. It is possible to generate code." So, to your question, yes. Those techniques from the course are 100% in play.
Back-end is turning the AST into something you can optimized and generate code from. (Sometimes there is a "middle-end" in there....) High-level optimizations, low level optimizations, memory allocation, register allocation.
Tooling is everything that keeps your life from being miserable as a user -- starting with debug symbols and these days people expect library and package management, etc, etc.
So if you are interested in exploring the Next Great Syntax or some semantic problems that can be re-written into C, then doing a C-front is a great way to do that. Let the C compiler handle all the really-really-really-hard back-end issues for you, and avoid all that distraction. But.... expect that getting debug symbols from your spiffy language into the ready-to-link object file is going to be, as they say, "non-trivial". So... great for experiments and a great learning exercise, but it's hard to do a production compiler that way.