Vaughn Royko
Web designer, indie game developer
Who are you, and what do you do?
Hello there, I'm Vaughn Royko. I do a lot of things, but most notably I'm a web designer and developer by trade and a hobbyist indie game designer and developer, primarily known for the HTML5-based survival roguelike, Wayward, branded under my fledgeling "company", Unlok. I also enjoy game collecting (and playing, sometimes).
What hardware do you use?
My main computer is nothing special. Just some thing that I can game and work on. It's rocking a GeForce GTX 470 with a AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 6 Core processor. I run a dual monitor set-up with one Samsung SyncMaster 29" and a Dell UltraSharp 19" (in tablet rotation) on the side.
I also lug around a fairly ancient HP Compaq 6535b Notebook around with me when I'm away from home (soon to be replaced when the new MacBook comes out this year). While at the office, I use a 2010 27" iMac.
And what software?
I'm a recent convert to multi-platform Sublime Text 2 and haven't looked back since - I use it for everything text and coding related. For the graphic side of things, I use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. For normal web browsing (when I'm not testing why my websites are broken in IE7), I use Chrome with dozens of cool plugins.
Besides all that normal stuff, I have come to swear by Google Docs and Google Drive. Who needs an office software suite anymore? I use Jing daily for sharing images and videos instantly, I can't believe I used to work without it. For video/audio editing, I use Adobe Premiere Pro and Audacity. For source control, I use both Subversion and Git (depending on the job). When I'm on Windows, I use TortoiseGit/TortoiseSVN, and on the Mac, I use Versions. I use FTP/SFTP a lot in both sides of my life. I have tried a lot of FTP clients over the years and now got it down to two choices: either WinSCP or FileZilla (if I am on the Mac).
What would be your dream setup?
My dream setup would involve a very long desk where I would have a large array monitors and computers (maybe laptops and tablets as well?) - possibly all booted up at the same time, depending on what I am doing. Probably with a mix of operating systems such as Windows 7, OS X Mountain Lion and possibly Ubuntu so I can easily test across platforms without virtual machines or dual booting.
Also, I need one of those stand-up, commercial-grade coffee makers beside me - Starbucks branded preferred. Actually, scratch all that, just the coffee maker will be good.