The Blog of Glen Moyes

I'm a long-time Adobe customer. I've been in a good position to use Adobe's software throughout my education and career. It's been a good experience for me, but only because I was a student when the Adobe software had perpetual licenses. You pay for the software once, and you own it forever. For a lot of the designers and content creators I associate with, they are not as content with Adobe as I am. Working with more students has opened my eyes to experiences that seem to be the norm, and those experiences are far from my own. The root of this seems to be Adobe's current subscription business model. I'm lucky that I graduated when I did, because if I graduated today, there's a greater chance that I wouldn't be a designer. Perpetual licenses saved me after college. I purchased Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium when I was a college student. The student version wasn't that expensive, and I was able to purchase every new version of the Creative Suite w...

I came across a really good article today called Better Than Free written by Kevin Kelly . The article is about how something that may be free and infinitely abundant—referring to digital media—can still be valuable enough that people will pay for it, even though the law of supply and demand states that if something is in infinite supply it will cost nothing. This made me think about how the ability to make perfect copies of digital media will affect the kind of work that I want to do. Every media industry that I can think of is complaining about piracy and how it's hurting their business: music, movies, video games, books, software, the list goes on and on. If it's so easy to get copies for free then why would anybody pay for it? I've been thinking about this topic a lot over the past few years because our studio's primary form of distribution will be internet downloads. Trying to create the best possible product and cultivate a high level of trust with customers, wh...

Before I turned to graphic arts my studies and hobbies were in music composition. Like everyone else in the demomusic scene I released music for free and competed in contests like MC6 and 30 minute compos on #trax. I don't compose much anymore but I still have a great love of music and the people who have the craft to do it well. I've been very passionate about independent music over the past couple of years since understanding more about the current state of the record industry. I'm not going to rant too much about this, and I don't think I need to because a lot of people would agree that the situation in the industry, for both artists and fans, is pretty abysmal. This doesn't have as much to do with the RIAA, it's about what artists under a record label have to go through; the record industry doesn't try to make music as much as they try to make celebrities. This is why I've become so passionate about the independent music scene. I still consider myse...

This came out on November 29, and it's one of the best lectures on game design I've listened to. It's called "Design Reboot" and it was given by Jonathan Blow at the Montreal International Game Summit 2007. If you go to the page on his blog about the lecture , there's a link to the Zip file that contains the MP3 and the PowerPoint presentation. He talks about what games really are, what they can teach you, why game designers lack discernment, and architecting vs. exploring in game design. I highly recommend this talk because it's a surprisingly truthful analysis of game design. Jonathan said everything that I've been wanting to tell the industry over the past 6 months, was in a position to do so, and told me some things that I didn't know. I'll do a summary of his talk and interject a few things of my own towards the end of this very long post, but first I should start this out with some of research I've been gathering on the subject prior ...

Update: Here's a great article on 1UP called " GameSpot's Sad State of Affairs " that covers the history and the repercussions of the firing of Jeff Gerstmann, former Editorial Director of GameSpot. The gaming community has assumed for a while that big video game publishers pay game journalists for positive coverage, hyped articles, and skewed reviews. Of course, we've had no proof of this kind of activity--up until November 28, which has now been called Gerstmanngate. Since then there's been a huge uproar in the gaming community, a flood of conspiracy theories and gamers have even been organizing GameSpot and Eidos boycotts. It wasn't until today that GameSpot finally released their official explanation about the firing of Jeff Gerstmann after an unfavorable review of a game that GameSpot received large sums of money to advertise. When I say "advertised," I mean that the entire site was skinned so that it was a giant site-wide ad, paid for by Ei...

Even though I'm not a student at the university anymore and have now reached the status of alumnus, I'll sneak into the art seminars and and university forums if I fell there's going to be a really worthwhile presentation. A few days ago I was told that Orson Scott Card was going to be speaking at University Forum. It didn't take much to convince myself and a few of my friends to attend the forum. We all wanted to hear him speak, and two of us—myself included— really wanted to ask him some questions. We've both been working our own large projects for a few years or more and even though we've never published a story or finished a film yet, we're both insistent that when the time comes that our studio has the resources to start production on one of these two projects, that we'll already have the story perfected. Neither of us are formally trained in story telling but we talk about it every day, read a lot on the subject, and discuss movies and shows that ...