Mochimedia is shutting down after March 31st. On that day, the analytics, advertising, and live updates for thousands (millions?) of flash games will go dark.
I have been using Mochibot and Mochiads since 2007, when I first started making Flash games. At the time I didn’t have my own computer, and I thought that I could make enough money through Flash games to buy one. My first game was terrible. So was the second. And the third. However, I slowly improved, and by 2009 I was able to make some not-so-crappygames, one of which even got sponsored! By 2012 I had even placed in a fewcontests.
Today my games net around 20 cents a day from Mochiads. However, I don’t really care much about losing this revenue stream. What I’m really going miss is the feeling of checking my game’s stats and seeing a spike in views. I’m going to miss the watching the little progress bar on the dashboard slowly creep up to 100%. I’m even going to miss the arguments about the merits of jigsaw puzzles on the community forums.
I made this semi-fancy particle simulation the two days ago as part of a job application. The code got really messy towards the end, but the result is pretty!
About a month ago I created a fancy fluid simulator for a computer graphics course. It uses GLSL shaders, not CUDA or OpenCL, to perform the simulation on the GPU, kind of like this, but with OpenGL instead of Direct3D.
It doesn’t work properly on some machines and is still kind of rough, so I’m not going to put up a download yet. Here’s a nice video instead. Wow, that’s a lot of apostrophes.
Today I discovered that I removed all of my Google Analytics tracking code during my layout overhaul in November. That could explain all of those daily zeroes and dissapointingly flat analytics graphs.
I put the js back into the page headers. I’m pretty sure that Google Analytics is still going to show the same flat graphs.
The Mac Skype client annoys me. It takes a while to startup, and just seems to be a bit on the slow side. The client has a fairly high memory footprint when I am not doing anything: no chats open and no active video or voice calls. Also, that side bar is a massive waste of space. Why not put the contact list there?
So, a couple weeks back I decided to download SkypeKit to make a simple, lightweight, chat-only (for now) Skype client. In its current state, the application can send recieve messages, and start new conversations with a single person. It allows the user can participate in multi-person conversations, but not start them.
So far, this project has been successful: The application starts quickly and consumes ~50-60MB for the runtime and application combined, as opposed to around ~150MB for the official client in simliar usage situations. It doesn’t have anywhere near the same amount of functionality as the official client, but it feels way faster.
Fallink is a Flash game I made last month for Mochimedia’s June summer contest. The theme was 60 second gameplay, so the gameplay is a bit short, but I find it strangely mesmerizing. It got an honorable mention, which is kind of cool.
I have not posted anything in 3 months. What have I been up to? iPhone development! More specifically OpenGL ES! I have a rudimentary rendering system up and running which supports both programmable and fixed function pipelines, although I do expect fixed function rendering to become increasingly less important. My renderer has a simple batching system for rendering sprites as textured quads (not camera aligned) that is pretty fast. Some cool things are going to be made with this.
To the left is a screenshot of the iPhone simulator running my renderer. It’s drawing about 400 sprites worth of pixely trees. Also shown in this figure are two jarringly unskinned native UI controls!
The past week I decided to learn Javascript. I added an awesome Ajax image gallery to both the Firefly and Hydralisk Origami Pages. It turned out much better than I expected.
Edit 10/31/2012: It’s not really Ajax. It’s just javascript.
