12 Years of GoldFire Studios

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...

Nordic.js: Building Distributed Systems

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 Launches on Steam

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

Benchmarking AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Packet and Vultr

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

CasinoRPG Launches on Steam

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

CasinoRPG Launches on iOS and Android

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 [https://casinorpg.com/ks] re-emphasized this cross-platform future with

Announcing Exocraft Beta

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 [https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/144/GoldFire-2.

CasinoRPG on Steam Greenlight

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

GoldFire 2.0

The current incarnation of the GoldFire Network was released just about 5 years ago. Since then, our studio has undergone significant change, expanding our portfolio of products and growing our team from one to five. The web itself has also seen an incredible transformation as it comes ever closer to

Howler.js v2.0 Released

In early 2013, I set out on a journey to simplify browser audio for our then in-development HTML5 multiplayer game, CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com]. It quickly became clear that this was a problem many in the development community faced, and howler.js [https://howlerjs.com] evolved into much more than

Benchmarking Top CDN Providers

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

Team++ - Benji Kay

We are excited to announce that Benji Kay has joined the GoldFire Studios team as a full-time software engineer! Benji started in mid-July, and he's been doing great work getting up to speed with the CasinoRPG code-base as well as taking lead on several big updates around slots and elsewhere.

Massive Memory Gains in Node.js 4.2

Still debating whether or not it's worth upgrading to the latest and greatest Node.js LTS, otherwise known as 4.2? If you are still running 0.12 or stuck even further in the dark ages on 0.10 and below, these numbers might make you think twice about being

Designing a $12k Office On a $2k Budget

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 [https://goldfirestudios.com/

New CasinoRPG Score by Megan Randa

Audio is something we highly value at GoldFire Studios (we open-sourced howler.js [http://howlerjs.com] after all). It is vital to set the right gameplay tone through the score, and the only way to do that is with original music. This is why we tackled that obstacle early in

2015 New Year's Resolutions

I'm a big believer in aiming too high. If you are consistently reaching your goals, then your goals aren't nearly as lofty as they should be. At GoldFire Studios, we want to push ourselves to the limits to truly see what we are capable of. We didn't write new year's

Horizontally Scaling Node.js and WebSockets with Redis

The Node.js cluster [http://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html] 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

CDN Benchmarks: CloudFlare vs CloudFront

We've become somewhat obsessed with squeezing every last bit of performance out of our HTML5 MMORPG [http://casinorpg.com], 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.

CasinoRPG Official Launch and Trailer

CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com] 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 [http://casinorpg.com/ks] and hit stride in

Bitcoin on GoldFire Network

If you aren't at least aware of Bitcoin; well, then you probably don't have an internet connection. And if you don't have an internet connection, then I'm going to assume you aren't reading this anyway. Bitcoin is something that we've experimented with for the last few years personally, and we

Kickstarter Roundup #11: Weekly Dose of Indie Games

Having gone through a successful Kickstarter campaign for CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com] in early 2013, we know how hard it is to get noticed and scrap all the way to your goal, especially if your name isn't Tim Schafer. So, we've decided to help spread the word about our fellow

Kickstarter Roundup #10: Weekly Dose of Indie Games

Having gone through a successful Kickstarter campaign for CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com] in early 2013, we know how hard it is to get noticed and scrap all the way to your goal, especially if your name isn't Tim Schafer. So, we've decided to help spread the word about our fellow

Kickstarter Roundup #9: Weekly Dose of Indie Games

Having gone through a successful Kickstarter campaign for CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com] in early 2013, we know how hard it is to get noticed and scrap all the way to your goal, especially if your name isn't Tim Schafer. So, we've decided to help spread the word about our fellow

The Power of Truly Social Gaming

As I've said before, games are the ultimate art form [https://goldfirestudios.com/blog/70/Games-are-the-ultimate-art-form]. However, games can be so much more than just art. They are a basic form of human connection; and, because of this, they will ultimately move to the forefront of breaking down cultural barriers

Kickstarter Roundup #8: Weekly Dose of Indie Games

Having gone through a successful Kickstarter campaign for CasinoRPG [http://casinorpg.com] in early 2013, we know how hard it is to get noticed and scrap all the way to your goal, especially if your name isn't Tim Schafer. So, we've decided to help spread the word about our fellow