This took a few days longer than expected--which, I am certain, will likely be the inscription on my gravestone at this point--but it's ready now!
One of the first people to leap at my offer to port games with your backing wasn't a game developer, but rather a game publisher.
There's a company named Jump, and they launched a game service yesterday. On the surface, it should look familiar to anyone that's used Steam, or Origin, or whatnot, but all the games on it are HTML-based, which means its users can just point their favorite browser at the website and start playing immediately, whether they're on Mac, Linux, or Windows.
Is the the future of gaming? I have no idea. But I see it as a clear and direct route to platform independence, and that is absolutely worth encouraging, and worth taking a few weeks to work on.
It's a strange world we live in; Unity and Unreal can both export to HTML5, and Emscripten+WebAssembly can turn C++ games into surprisingly efficient browser code. Add in WebGL and SDL2's full Emscripten port, persistent storage from IndexedDB, and suddenly you've got a platform that can run pretty serious games.
Porting The End is Nigh was a fun project; it started with an OpenGL renderer that needed some tweaks to remove some compatibility profile calls and make it GLES 2.0 (that is: WebGL) friendly. FMOD got replaced with OpenAL, and a handful of other little changes got the bulk of the game going. The real trick (and complication) of Emscripten is that there are no threads, and you can't block, ever; more or less, you run a function 60 times a second and if it can't get its work done, it better be prepared to do a little more of it next frame. It's an aggressive policy; if you don't do it, Firefox will ask the user if they should kill your program, and your OpenGL SwapBuffers calls won't actually draw to the screen until your function returns anyhow.
That's intimidating, but usually solvable. The bigger problem right now is that all of this is documented but you tend to spend a lot of time looking for information on how to deal with all these alien obstacles. I'd like to write up something to solve that problem, having done a few Emscripten-based games now. Hopefully there will be time soon.
Unlike other online game stores, you don't buy games on Jump. It's an all-you-can-eat subscription service with all published games available to you, so you don't need to buy The End is Nigh specifically on their service, just like you don't buy Stranger Things on Netflix.
Normally they give out two-week free trials, but they've offered me a pile of invites for my patrons that give you free access for a longer time. We're working out the details on how to get those to you and how many I'll get to hand out. Keep an eye out for details in the next few days.
Those that want to poke around right now (free trial or otherwise), you can see The End is Nigh and many other games at https://playonjump.com/ ...
For those of you going "hey, what about a _native_ Linux port?!" To you I say: stay tuned. :)