The ease of porting in the "Indie"/VN space is exactly why I brought this up. I don't have any obvious way to actually count it, but my guess is that >95% of Games on this site alone are made with one of the 6 engines I noted, which means platform specific bugs will mostly be "don't assume a case-insensitive file system" and "don't assume font x to be installed".
I did check the documentations a bit:
- Unity: Linux toolchain to build from Windows is in the Unity Hub, maybe install WSL2
- Unreal: cross-compiler toolchain is in a download from the documentation
- Twine: creates HTML/JS anyways, only thing to check is file name cases
- Ren'py & Godot: just add the build configuration
- RPG Maker: create a Web version
That's it.
None of them require anything like a separate build host or additional licensing. The engine developers already support Linux with as little friction as possible.
But what I'm missing in this discussion would be more input from
actual, active developers. So far, only
@misterfluffums and
@Rebel 357 do have published games I could find, and both are in favour of Linux builds.
a mix of "built that" and "reverse engineered that to port it" here:
Unity and Unreal require a hell of a lot more than that, and often the unity linux version has stupid bugs they don't bother fixing. Linux audio was broken for years because they just shat the sound out to the first output they found rather than the default so if that's not what your speakers are hooked up to, you get to learn all about linux audio routing to fix it. Whee!
videos in those are a disaster since you have to re-encode every video for each platform as none of them play nice with each other's codecs. VP8 helps some there... Unity and Unreal require you to also compress all textures (or images, for VN) with the right codec per platform. So you have to upload 3x as much. Not a big deal if you have fiber, a hours-long wait if you're stuck with shitty internet.
Unreal is native C++ so you have to build your source, and all libraries, for each platform. Unity covers most of the platform differences with the runtime but with unreal you're rawdogging hardware compat for anything you're adding to the engine. Any third party libraries or whatever, you have to make sure they build as well. Those two aren't just "make sure your filenames are right".
Renpy just works, even if the dev doesn't make a linux build. Just drop in the binaries for that version of renpy or run the game from the renpy editor directly. Still have to check case sensitivity since that one idiot fucked it up 40 years ago when cloning CPM and we've been stuck with it ever since. You can make a triple-release with win/linux/mac all in one download but since the engine doesn't export that way you almost never see devs doing that.
RPGMaker is mostly just javascript and malicious abuse of json to represent bytecode, so you can run node or electrum or whatever it is from the game root and it just plays normally. May have to decrypt it first, but that's easy enough. I assume it's not released multiplatform because they RPGMaker itself doesn't export that way, but it does just work.
Twine probably just works already even if the dev doesn't make it for other platforms.
I've had no problems rebuilding godot games for linux without the source. Even if they're "encrypted" that takes less than a second to bypass.
I've got tools to manage most of the above automatically. Renpy is the most "one-button" since that's the majority of the VNs I play, but aside from U & U I've ported the rest of those to linux without the source with varying amounts of effort.
