The year is coming to a close, so we thought we'd give an update on what we've been working on and discuss how this impacts the upcoming full release.

After completely re-building our companion AI system earlier in the year, we've continued to iterate and polish with a variety of major new improvements to further elevate our trusty therapy robot.

Along with many bug fixes and other improvements, we've finally added an inventory system to Arctic Awakening!

We revealed the new gameplay trailer for Arctic Awakening at Future of Play and also detail the changes in the latest demo build.

Joff Winks discusses his process for creating and implementing adaptive music in Arctic Awakening.

Play an updated demo for a limited time as part of the London Games Festival.

We went back to the drawing board and completely re-built Alfie's companion AI from the ground up to support physics-based movement, vastly improved navigation, interactions, proximity rules and much more.

We're thrilled to have been made official selections for Day of the Devs, The MIX and AdventureX!

Take a look at some early concepts of the game before it was "Arctic Awakening".

What issues did we find during the recent beta demo and what are we doing about them?

We've always dreamed of having a game showcased at E3. That wasn't in the cards this year with E3 being canceled, but many of the E3-adjacent showcases continued anyway, and we were excited to be part of the Future Games Show's summer showcase!

We’re looking for an environment/prop 3D artist to be a full-time core member of our small team, working on Arctic Awakening and future projects.

The original plan for Arctic Awakening was 5 episodes released monthly. For a number of reasons, we've decided to change to a single release model.

We peel back the curtain and look at some early sketches and concepts as we explore ideas before landing on the look/feel for our main characters, Kai and Alfie.

Nature plays such an important role in Arctic Awakening that we treat it as somewhat of a character all its own. For that reason, even with a stylized sci-fi setting, grounding the game world in the real world has been a focus since the very early days of pre-development.

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 [https://arcticawakening.com] is an episodic narrative adventure set

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 [https://exocraft.io] and the subsequent flood of traffic revealed the flaw of our reliance on Amazon Web Services [https://aws.amazon.com] -- bandwidth cost. Within a month of launching, our costs surged nearly 10x entirely due to bandwidth costs on our EC2 servers

As we discussed in our previous post about CasinoRPG launching on mobile [https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/148/CasinoRPG-Launches-on-iOS-and-Android], 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