I’m finally going to be able to take full advantage of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Service. I’ve been using the service for two years thanks to my wife’s school discount but in a very limited capacity. I have only been able to use the apps on my iPad and Photoshop and InDesign at work. The reason for the limited use was the age of my home PC. Not long after I began using Creative Cloud Adobe stopped supporting both my CPU and GPU. With a new PC now that will change.
Education Available
Adobe’s Creative Cloud service may not be an inexpensive subscription, but it may be essential. I’m old enough to remember the days of finding someone with a bootleg copy of Photoshop. Getting access to such a powerful design program back in the early days was impressive. Of course back in those days there was very little educational resources. With no real knowledge and no way to learn, it became more of a geek trophy.
Today there are plenty of resources available online to learn Adobe’s products. My favorite Adobe instructor is Designer & Adobe Certified Instructor Daniel Walter Scott from Bring Your own Laptop. From my first InDesign course with Daniel on Udemy I knew I was going to learn a lot. It was because of this I knew I wanted to continue learning these powerful tools.
An Impressive Toolbox
Adobe’s Creative Cloud has a lot of great resources for game development. Although I began using most for creative design it’s clear how I’ll be using them for game design now. I have begun to use Fresco for my sketches and drawings. I have used Photoshop for character design in the past but its clear it will also help with backgrounds as well. Illustrator will likely come in handy once I eventually settle on a logo design and Premiere Pro should help with game trailers and videos. Programs like Animate and Character Animator were not on my radar until I recently discovered their inclusion in the all apps package. It will be interesting to see how I integrate these two programs into character design.
I still plan to use programs like blender and Aseprite but in looking for the right tools I began to realize I had downloaded a lot of different programs. Using many of the tools in Creative Cloud will hopefully cut down on the time it takes to learn each and every one individually.
Not for Everyone
I do understand that using Adobe’s products may not be for everyone. The subscription model can be a bit pricey at $52.99 a month for the All Apps plan. It does help if you can get the educational discount of course. For me I’m not sure I could do without them even at this point. Now with the ability to work at home more as well as on the iPad they’ll become even more valuable. One of my disappointments is that the Substance 3D collection is a separate $49.99 a month charge. These programs were recommended in the book Gamedev by Wlad Marhulets but I will likely stick with learning blender instead.
Some may have an issue with the inability to buy the programs outright anymore but given the fact that most of these programs were in the hundreds to purchase, the subscription model does in deed fit the individual consumer much better.
