The title says it all. Three-year anniversary and free to play.

The wait is over.

The Cat and the Box now runs on Mac! Unfortunately, this required bundling a JDK (the big boi) with the app, but let's not worry about that. The important thing is that it can run on a Mac, and it meets Steam's standard of not requiring the user to download Java. I tested it out on my virtual machine and it runs, but there are some weird mouse issues. I'm 99% sure that's just a consequence of using a virtual machine and not actually a compatibility issue, but I'd appreciate it if some Mac user with access to the game would test that out for me anyway before release, just to be sure. Now, let's talk about Linux support. I have worked on making it run on Linux by launching it from a shell script with a given JRE. So it maybe possibly kind of sort of works. The problem is I can't test it yet because I don't have access to a Linux operating system, and I've had enough virtual machines for one lifetime. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure my shell script doesn't work, so no Linux support yet. Soon I'll go home and fire up my big Linux machine and do some testing and fixing, and it'll hopefully be ready by release time.

The Cat and the Box has finally passed review, but as an app that supports Windows only. This is unfortunate because it runs on Java, which means it has the potential to run on any operating system in the world. The problem is that Steam doesn't want Java to be a prerequisite for running my game. They would rather the game runs no matter what. Their preferred solution is to install a JRE with the game and make it the system's java home. This has the potential to piss a lot of people off because this JRE will become outdated eventually and potentially break peoples' other apps. People may never know it was me who screwed everything up, but I'll still have a hard time sleeping at night. So instead I've made it install a JRE but only use it to launch this particular app instead of making it the java home. The problem with this approach is that the .jar file can't find the JRE on its own, so it needs an executable wrapper. Launch4j provides an exe wrapper, but of course, this will only work on Windows. I believe there is a way I can write a script for Mac and Linux that will launch a .jar with a provided JRE, which will allow me to add Mac and Linux support. I'll try to figure that out before release time. tl;dr: hang tight guys, I'm gonna try to bring this game to every operating system before release time.