Flack: The Polishing Process (Part 3) news

I wasn't expecting to have a Part 3 this week. In fact, I was pretty sure my only To-Do was create levels for the campaign, yet there ended up being important things to communicate before the game's release.

First of all, I added a nice damage alert system to the game. Prior to this feature, players would die without really knowing how much health was left. With this new feature, you'll be sure to know when you're about to die after a blinking red box shows up on your screen. This isn't meant to be annoying; it's designed to slow you down when you get frustrated with difficult parts of the level. Here's a pic:

If you played the beta/demo/flack test 7.jar then you might of noticed how ridged the transitions between levels felt. There was no indication of what level you were on, or even clear ways of knowing if you completed the chapter. Well now there is.

Level completion (with a 'next level' indicator):

 
Chapter Complete (credits):

 
The level maker tool got a few fixes yesterday. The minus (-) button use to only delete levels in between other levels. Now it will also remove empty or full levels from any position of your custom chapter/campaign. This doesn't need a picture, but I'm going to post one anyway:

This next topic has been a heavy one for me. It has to do with the Linux players, and it isn't very happy news. I decided to hold off on selling the game to Linux players for a few reasons. Here's why:

• Linux Java library divisions have caused a lot of trouble for me in my development. The whole issue between OpenJDK vs Sun JRE have created a new problem that makes it even harder for players to try out Flack. After lots of testing, it turns out having Sun JRE installed works the best for Flack, yet all sound files can only play once each time the game is launched. On top of that OpenJDK doesn't seem to work at all.
• The amount of Linux players is very small. As an independent indie developer, pushing more energy towards cross-platforming has really cost me a lot of time. For now, I can no longer cater the development and fixes for a smaller audience that use Linux systems. If this is not the case, and the audience is much larger than I am saying, then I will change my direction of thinking right away.

That being said, I do plan on revisiting and hopefully distributing a sell-able version for Linux players. I simply must go on for now. Time's passing faster than I would like, and there is still much to accomplish in the next week. Thanks for reading!

P.S. Thank you everyone for the positive and negative feed back reviews. Without your input, this game would honestly have been a stinker. Like I've mentioned many times, the downloadable version is REALLY outdated. If you felt like the game was boring, or too static, that's because it was. I can now say this confidently: The release version is going to be a blast!