Why doesn't this run in the browser? :( It's 2023 - and no offence intended - but I would rather not download a binary blob from a random Internet page to execute it outside the browser's sandbox. Especially since it looks this game could easily be programmed with WASM and/or vanilla JavaScript.
I've been working on making a base or skeleton game engine for when I participate in Itch.io game jams that compiles from C++ to web assembly using Emscripten. It's exactly as you say no one wants to download and run an unknown binary blob; this severely limits how many people will try your game. I'm alternately impressed that I can port C++ in this way at all, and sad at the state of the tooling still after so long.…
While it mostly worked, it wasn't a very polished environment and how well it worked depended greatly on which browser was used. And even in the best case there were still annoyances surrounding things like fullscreen handling.
It all echoed of 90s-era web development when we had to test every browser and kludge browser-specific exceptions due to incompatibilities. It's been over a decade since I cared about web stuff, so maybe this is just the way it still is in general and not just emscripten/wasm support.
Whatever the reason, it didn't inspire much confidence to rely on this pipeline for delivering native+web games to the masses in a single implementation.