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...

EDIT: This article has a follow up post about the beta program that was written a year later. And yes, I do mean life changing. Ever wonder how much time you actually spend on a project? If you bid a 40 hour project are you really sure it's going to take that long? How much time does each stage of the project take? How many hours do you spend emailing the client? What about other activities during the day like visiting websites, recreation, and cooking food? Where is your time going? I've wanted to know the answers to those questions for a very long time. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I could never know for sure without an easy to use timeclock program. In the past I've searched for a free one that does not require a web server and is adequate for single person use, but I couldn't find one. Luckily a week and a half ago I found a very promising candidate thanks to an article on Webdesigner Debot . It's called Klok , an Adobe AIR app and therefore multipl...

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...

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 ...

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 ...