MochiBot Blog

I just ran across a sweet commecial over the weekend that Coke put together. It’s a play on GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and they pulled it off nicely. It leaves me feeling all warm and fuzzy… or could that be from the three Cokes I’ve had this morning. Launch video

TheSimpleAndy just released a brain twisting trilogy of his famed Click Drag Type series. This third game adds five new puzzles along with puzzles previously released in CDT and CDT2. Not only are the new puzzles more challenging, but there have also been many improvements to both the interface and puzzles.

Some of these puzzles can be quite challenging so we’ve created a forum that will allow you to discuss the game and get hints for the puzzles.

We don’t usually sponsor games, but we made an exception with Andy because we were impressed by his enthusiasm, smarts, and most of all passion for the creative process. We were even more impressed when he consistently made his milestones, was proactive about communicating with us, and most importantly making a great final product. If you’re looking to hire a top notch guy, then we’d recommend you start here: Email TheSimpleAndy

It seems like a new online video site is launched every day and many of them are all clones of one another. Then a star is born and it’s called Neave.tv. The site isn’t so much a video community, uploading, sharing, blah blah blah destination. Instead it’s a showcase of how smart design and great coding can produce awe inspiring results (even at my 1920×1200 resolution). Here’s my personal favorite.

**Note: The site is both processor and bandwidth intensive so it’s not for the meager and weak.

You all may know of Paul Neave from other great works such as Flash Earth, Neave Games, or simply Neave.com. He’s definitely one of the most talented and creative interactive developers in the community. A big shout out to Neave from the Mochi Team for inspiring all of us!

A new MochiBot member, Alan Rawkins, recently released a highly addicting game of sea life acrobatics called Dolphin Olympics. The controls are smooth, physics are highly realistic and there are some pleasant little surprises when you start pulling off the high flying acrobatics. Here’s a more detailed review from our friends at Jay is Games.

One of the things I commonly see people do when launching a link from Flash is to use the onPress method with getURL. This combination works in IE, but fails in Firefox if the domain is not explicitly allowed to launch popups.

The simple solution to overcoming blocked popups in Firefox is to use the onRelease method instead of the onPress method.

Here’s a sample SWF. You can also use the “Download FLA” link for additional reference.

The crew at Pepere just released a new and exciting game called Jump Gear Random. The game combines some great art, death defying stunts and a challenging obstacle course to make for a time wasting Friday.

Our good friends at Jay is Games are holding a game design competition that’s open to everyone. The challenge is simple: just build one mind boggling puzzle in Flash similar to the ones in Click Drag Type. Execution may be a bit harder, but it could be well worth your while since prizes include a copy of Flash 8 Professional, a black Nintendo DS Lite, and more prizes to come. Try your puzzle master skills out and toss your hat in the ring. Contest details

It’s been a long two weeks since our database crashed, but we worked arduously to recover and made several improvements to MochiBot along the way. As I said before we had to remove “unique” counts from all reports, but in exchange you’ll experience a must faster and more reliable site. You can also count on seeing new daily reports an hour or two after midnight Pacific Standard Time instead of having to wait an entire day. Overall there have been some major performance improvements to the site so we hope that the wait has been worthwhile for everyone.

And now that the site has been upgraded, tested, and stability assured we can finally go out and throw back some cold ones. Cheers!

I’ve been playing around with Meebo’s new widget feature today and wanted to test it out on our site. They’ve done a nice job of using Flash to implement the widget.

If you see us online then drop us a note.

Sorry for the unresponsive site as of late, but we’re still recovering from the database crash last week. We’ve been growing a lot in both users and traffic so we’re making a few changes to the system to accommodate this growth. In the past week we’ve been faced with several tough decisions on how to best serve our existing members. Ultimately system performance and reliability is the key to our success so we decided to remove “unique viewers” data from the reports since they consume the greatest amount of resources in data processing. Our decision stemmed from a recent survey of our members which indicated that “uniques” data was not as important as having a fast site and quick reports.

For those of you who do consume the “uniques” data we intend on bringing the data back in the future as a premium service. We eventually have to charge for something in the future so this will be our first step in implementing a premium membership. No milestones have been set as to when the premium membership will launch, but we’ll start making plans once these fixes are complete.

The new changes to the system will be finished by the end of the week August 4 soon :-|. We’ll make an announcement once everything is tested and back in order. With the removal of “uniques” data the system will perform much more reliably and quickly. We’re working hard to provide the community with a quality service so we hope this compromise improves your experience with MochiBot.

We take all your feedback into consideration as we grow so please keep all those emails coming. Please send your emails to feedback@mochibot.com.