The Blog of Glen Moyes

Just checking and reminding everyone that Hackberry Hollow is still in steady production. Here's some recent concept art, showing a sneak peak of Chapter 1. Be sure to check out the blog for more concept art and updates on the project. Yes, I haven't been posting on my personal blog very much, but we do post on the Hackberry Hollow blog every Tuesday without fail, and the content is far more interesting. So subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on what I'm working on. We're all extremely excited about the project. We got the story nailed and the script is being written (we are almost done with the first volume out of five). The reactions to the script have been overwhelmingly positive, so we definitely feel that we have a winner and can't wait to get this project released. The Animation Academy About 5 months ago I enrolled into The Animation Academy down in Burbank for character design classes and wow, has it been a big help. Also today is The Animation Aca...

I recently reinstalled Windows onto my computer, a ritual that I have done for years to keep my operating system running nicely thanks to Windows bit rot. I usually do it about once a year, in this case it's been two so it really needed a fresh install. The problems with regularly reinstalling Windows are downloading and installing all of the updates, which takes forever since my original Windows XP Pro disc is Service Pack 1. Luckily there's software that makes the process easier. nLite I wish I knew about this program earlier. nLite is an easy to use application that allows you to make a backup copy of your Windows install disc, slipstream the service pack and updates into the Windows install (google for the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers; it's an EXE file that nLite will ask for to do that), install drivers such as my SATA drivers that I needed to install Windows on something other than my old soon-to-fail IDE ...

You know that top secret Lumaglyph project I've been mentioning recently? Well, it's not a secret anymore. Here's the announcement. Hackberry Hollow is our first internal project at Lumaglyph, and we've recently launched the site at HackberryHollow.com . We set up a blog so we can post new concept art and other cool stuff as the project develops. The blog is updated every Tuesday afternoon. We've been writing the story for about a year now. Both Adam and I are really excited with how the story has developed, and so far everyone we've shared it with loves it. Now that we have a solid outline for the story we are going into high gear working on the concept art. So be sure to subscribe to the Hackberry Hollow RSS feed for updates on my new work. Here's some of the artwork I've posted so far. So that's what we've been working on: Hackberry Hollow . Visit the site, post comments on the artwork, and soon we'll have an epic webcomic for you to read...

Celtx is a great and all for writing stories, but when it comes to online collaborative writing our team uses Gobby . Gobby allows multiple people to work on the same text file at the same time. You don't have to designate one person as the scribe. You don't have to take turns. You can type where ever you want when ever you want, and any text you insert will be highlighted with your user color, so you always know who wrote what. Gobby was created with programmers in mind, so it features line numbering, auto indenting, and syntax highlighting. As writers we ignore those features except for the line numbering. Our text documents can get quite long and it's easy to say "look at line 2053," because they can press Ctrl-I and enter that line number in to zip them to the same line you're looking at. The user highlighting has also been useful for us to tag sections that need attention with bright red or some other obnoxious color that you can't possibly miss. We j...

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.

Celtx 2.0 was released this past week. For going from 1.0 to 2.0, Celtx doesn't have a whole lot of new features . The two big changes are Celtx Studio, which is their $50 yearly subscription version of Project Central with a free beta until March 24, and the ability to add Extensions/Add-Ons to Celtx, which I'm really excited about.

You'll be hearing a lot more about illustration from me in the future as our project develops, and to kick it off here's the brushes I use for most of my illustration work. I didn't include any of my special brushes for things like trees and water; most of those brushes are created on a per-project basis and I only ever used them once, although I did go ahead and include my fur brush. Anyway, these are the brushes I use all the time. Glen Moyes 2009.03 Brush Presets – 85MB Glen Moyes 2009.03 Tool Presets – 85MB Here they are in action. Many of these brushes have a narrow tip like a calligraphy brush, and they use the pen tilt of the stylus to rotate the brush tip, so you really need an Wacom Intuos tablet or better to take advantage of these brushes. I'll get into the advantages of a narrow brush tip when I start doing video tutorials on painting with Photoshop. I've provided a Tool Preset and Brush Preset file for these brushes. You should download both so you c...