James Simpson

We take a look behind-the-scenes at some of the tools we've used with the Unity game engine to make Arctic Awakening possible.

In order to fully understand Arctic Awakening's player character, I decided to go on my first flight lesson and see the world from his virtual eyes.

It is often said that visuals in games aren't nearly as important as the gameplay. We absolutely believe this to be true; however, when making a game where the story is the gameplay, those visuals suddenly rise in importance. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is

We've had a secret project in the works for over a year that has been torture to keep under wraps. It's a significant departure from anything we've done before, which is what has us so excited and energized creatively. Arctic Awakening is an episodic narrative adventure set in the unforgiving

We've been working out of our downtown Oklahoma City office for the last 5 years, but now we are embracing going fully remote.

It is hard to believe, but GoldFire Studios turns 12 today! To celebrate, we are launching this brand new studio website. We've come a long way over this time...

Working with cutting edge technology at GoldFire Studios has afforded me the opportunity to share what I've learned with the community by speaking at development conferences all over the country. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to take those lesson overseas when I spoke at the incredible Nordic.js

Exocraft launched on the web just over a year ago, but this was only the beginning of its journey. We've been hard at work making new features, overhauling the gameplay and fixing countless bugs as we approached the full rollout of the game across all platforms. Today is the next

The launch of Exocraft.io and the subsequent flood of traffic revealed the flaw of our reliance on Amazon Web Services -- bandwidth cost. Within a month of launching, our costs surged nearly 10x entirely due to bandwidth costs on our EC2 servers (it would have been worse if we

As we discussed in our previous post about CasinoRPG launching on mobile, our goal has always been to make CasinoRPG truly cross-platform. The idea from day one was to allow our players to access the full CasinoRPG experience no matter their device or platform of choice. The mobile launch on

Development began on CasinoRPG way back in the fall of 2012 with the goal of creating a truly cross-platform gaming experience. We focused on browsers because we were (and still are) believers in the power of the open web. Our Kickstarter re-emphasized this cross-platform future with stated goals of releases

When I started GoldFire Studios nearly a decade ago, the goal was always to build a community of games and the diverse people that play them. It is this goal that led us to build the GoldFire platform that we relaunched earlier this year. It is also this goal that

One of our goals at GoldFire Studios has always been to make our games available everywhere that our players might want them to be, whether on our primary platform of the web or one of the many app stores. We’ve been making a conscious effort to ramp up those

In early 2013, I set out on a journey to simplify browser audio for our then in-development HTML5 multiplayer game, CasinoRPG. It quickly became clear that this was a problem many in the development community faced, and howler.js evolved into much more than the simple helper it set out

UPDATE: After speaking with CloudFlare's CTO, I've been informed that they don't cache audio files (even static ones) by default. I'm in the process of re-doing the large file test and will update the results accordingly. UPDATE 2: The charts for the large file tests have been updated and CloudFlare

I've always had a fascination with startup offices. Creating the right environment that props up your unique culture is vital to long-term success. Not only is it important for the creative process, but also for the competitive market of tech hiring. Being a bootstrapped startup, our first two offices were

The Node.js cluster module is a common method of scaling servers, allowing for the use of all available CPU cores. However, what happens when you must scale to multiple servers or virtual machines? That is the problem we faced when scaling our newest HTML5 MMORPG. Rather than trying to

We've become somewhat obsessed with squeezing every last bit of performance out of our HTML5 MMORPG, but up until recently, we hadn't put much thought outside of our own code. Since CasinoRPG is a rather large-scale HTML5 game, it has considerably more resources than your typical webpage. We are talking

CasinoRPG has been an incredible journey so far, and while we've only just begun, we are reaching yet another milestone along the way. Development on CasinoRPG began in early 2012, picked up steam in early 2013 with our Kickstarter and hit stride in late 2013 and into 2014 with beta