The Blog of Glen Moyes

A couple of days ago Braid was finally released on Steam . I bought it, played it and enjoyed everything about it: the puzzles, the art, and especially the story telling mechanic in the last level. I had already decided to buy the game long before because Jonathan Blow always gives such good talks on game design , so I was more than happy to send money his way as soon as a PC version was available. Anyway, check the game out. A free demo is already out in the wild so you can it a whirl.

A week ago I had 4 games on my wish list: Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, Left 4 Dead, and StarCraft 2. No one has any idea when StarCraft2 is going to be released, but the other three games are all coming out weeks apart from each other. I can't recall a time when 3 games I've been committed to buying for being so creative, well produced, and all-out awesome have all come out within a matter of weeks. There's one less game on my wish list because I'm now a happy owner of one of them, and the holiday season for gaming is looking bright. Far Cry 2 I'm so happy I got this game. After my not so pleasant experience with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (read below) I was really hoping for another open world first person shooter. I usually wait until after the game is released before I buy it, but I've read good previews about Far Cry 2, and I wanted to save $5, so I went ahead and preordered it on Steam. I'm glad I did because the game rocks. Visually the game is superb. The art directi...

I have a habit when it comes to playing newly purchased games. It's basically a planned splurge of my free time. For about three days, or how ever long it takes me to beat the game, I'll use all my free time to play it until I've completed it, at which point I'll move on with the rest of life. For this reason I usually buy games on a Friday and then play it through the weekend. If it's a really good game I'll play through it twice to relive all the good moments or to find/unlock things I've missed. If it's an exceptional game I'll play it often for a few months or even years. This doesn't happen very often, and I can only recall doing it with Descent and Unreal Tournament 2004. This habit lets me play plenty of games and gives me a pretty uninterrupted experience of the entire thing. I've also found that I can get through games faster this way since I don't have to remember what it was I was supposed to do when I left off. Thanks to Steam...

Following up on my previous post about AudioSurf , the game was officially released on Steam a couple of days ago. It's $10, and a free demo is available. So, go check it out .

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...

Bryan and I just finished playing through Diablo II: Lord of Destruction yesterday. We even went to The Secret Cow Level. "Moo." This was the first time I played any of the Diablo games. I'll have to admit that I was never interested in playing Diablo until recently. Over the past few weeks I've been undergoing a sort of game education regime. We are planning on creating a strategy game in the near future (hilarious, simple, and hopefully commercially successful), and since I'm not a strategy game buff I needed to do some research, which of course means playing games. Recently I've been playing all kinds of strategy games, in particular Supreme Commander which has become our favored subject in honing the strategy/micro-managing portion of my brain. During this time we've been simultaneously working on creating a rendering engine for the OLPC, and since most of our good game ideas would require some kind of 3D graphics or advanced 2D graphics rendering tech...

I came across this little gem of a game called Audiosurf a couple of weeks ago. It's a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. Today I participated in the beta weekend so I was able to play it for the first time. The thing that drew me to Audiosurf, aside from it being an independent title, is that it's a puzzle game where each stage is generated from music files on your computer, and the same songs become the soundtrack for the stage. The speed and difficulty change with the intensity of the music you provided, and the blocks appear to the beat of the music. This works really well when you play songs that have a strong beat and lots of dynamics. The way the puzzle works is you have to run over a block to put in on the board. The block falls in the corresponding lane (column) on the grid. To remove blocks and to get points you need 3 blocks of the same color touching each other in any configuration. Red blocks are worth the most points while the cooler-colored ...

I've been a long-time fan of the Unreal series by Epic Games since its debut in 1998. I can recall countless LAN parties where we played the original Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004. I can even attribute the Audigy2 ZS that's in my computer right now from playing UT2004 competitively. Let's just say that I'm a fan. When I first saw the screenshots for Unreal Tournament 3 back in August 2005 I was really excited, not to mention worried that I wouldn't have a computer beefy enough to play it when the time came. Over the years I actually lost interest in UT3 and Epic Games because of their new direction to gaming that became vividly apparent at E3 2006. In the meantime Nintendo and Valve caught my interest, and I had all but forgotten about UT3 until the demo was announced a few months ago. UT3 is out now, and as a UT fan I hate to say that I actually feel let down by the game. There's a few reasons for this. First, the game has...

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 ...

Speaking of video games, This is proof that I need more free time. This is entirely due to a television ad that I'm working on. The visuals should be done tomorrow and I'll get the audio done a couple of days after that. It's been neat taking part in the entire process of creating an ad, and being able to see a design project of this magnitude from beginning to end. I've had a lot of help from the rest of us in our little 5-man studio: critiquing, concept art, and animation (lots of animation). I'll likely post the ad up here when it's done. I wish that's all I had to do before Christmas, but I have to move and job hunt too. Oh well. Until then, I miss you Team Fortress 2. Here's the link to my Steam profile so you can see what dirty rotten games I've been playing and for how long. There's also a picture of a scary possessed evil satanic squirrel there too (the spawn of a graphic designer when he did have too much time on his hands). So that...

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...