Cardinal Quest Day 6 Status: $2411 Pledged, $3589 To Go.

After a short stay at the >$2800 range someone issued a charge-back for $500- which brings us to the current rate of $2411.

$3589 still remain before we reach our funding goal with 1 month to go!

Cardinal Quest Day 4 Status: $2310 Pledged, $3690 To Go.

After the devastating bugs in 8BitFunding's system have been fixed by their new developer, Cardinal Quest returns to strong growth on its forth day with $2310 pledged.

$3690 and 32 days to go.

Hilarity Fails to Ensue as 8BF's Former Developer Leave a Mess Behind Them

Geoff Gibson (8BitFunding's owner) tweets:

"For those wondering, yes, Cardinal Quest does actually have $1765 in funds. A bug is causing havoc with our fund calculations however."

Geoff has promised his new developer is working to fix those and other issues as soon as possible.

Cardinal Quest on 8BitFunding, Day 2 Update

With 6 hours left to the 48h marks since 8BitFunding.com went live with Cardinal Quest on it, the mark now stands at $1,765!

Only $4,235 to go!


In other news, the sum total display on 8bf is still buggy and lags behind the actual pledges (which you can see on the left sidebar) ;(

-Ido.

Holy Crap! Cardinal Quest Received $1205 On Its First Day On 8BitFunding.com!

Thank you all so much!

Only $4795 to go - here's to hoping the 2nd day will go as well as the first! :)

-Ido.

EDIT:
There is a bug on 8bf that doesn't list anonymous contributions in the lump sum, that's why the displayed sum is a bit lower than in reality.

Why I'm Moving From HTML5 To Flash

As you might have noticed, Corey & I have submitted Cardinal Quest, an html5/js game that got quite a lot of attention on reddit, hacker news & twitter, to 8BitFunding in order to raise some money so that we can work on it full-time and release the flash version in a month instead of a year.

  Wait, Flash version?

You ask? Yep, that's correct!

  But...Cardinal Quest is an html5 game! It's the game of the future! Open standards! Mobile platforms! Canvas!

That was indeed the plan, which is why Cardinal Quest's prototype is written in js and html5.

Reality, however, has once again reared its ugly head. There are 3 main reasons why the final version will be written in Flash:

Browser support of html5 features is spotty at best

Each browser has its own quirks- some have buggy canvas implementations, some support only mp3 encoding in audio tags, others only ogg.

One of them doesn't yet support any html5 tags at all (workarounds exist, but are suboptimal to say the least).

Performance is not up to par

Even tho great strides have been made with regards to js execution in recent years, rendering graphics in canvas is still considerably slower than rendering graphics in flash.

Additionally, there is a huge difference in js execution speed between browsers - it is not uncommon for me to get 4x the FPS in Chrome as in Firefox.

There is no FGL for html5 games

Flash games have been around for years- they can be packed in a single SWF file, portals know how to host them, they are easy to embed and easy to distribute.

All those add up to the fact that it is significantly easier as a game developer to sell flash games than html5 ones.

The market for html5 games simply does not exist yet - at least not at nearly the same scale as the market for flash games.

Is html5 the future? I sure hope so!

Unfortunately, it isn't the present.

Cardinal Quest on 8BitFunding.com!

In response to all the positive response Cardinal Quest has received (>15,000 visitors, mostly within a couple of days when it hit reddit and a bunch of other social linking sites), Corey & I have decided to try to get some funding in order to finish up the game and put it on sale on FlashGameLicense.

We are using a new crowd-sourcing funding site for indie games called 8BitFunding.com, which just went online today and has Cardinal Quest in their first round of games being funded - check it out!