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A picture of Brendon Chung

Brendon Chung

Indie game developer (Blendo)

in developer, game, mac, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Brendon Chung and I make video games at my company, Blendo games. I'm the only employee, so I do all the design, art, programming, and business stuff. I'm based in the Los Angeles area, and I've made games for PC, Mac, Linux, and Xbox 360.

What hardware do you use?

My home office desktop computer has an Intel i5 CPU (2.67 GHz) with 6 GB RAM and a 22" 1680x1050 Gateway monitor. I use Logitech Z-2300 speakers. Everything's set up on an Ikea Jerker standing desk, and I stand on a Sublime Anti-Fatigue Mat.

I'm pretty happy with the standing setup. I find that standing up gives is just uncomfortable enough to encourage you to get your tasks done, as opposed to dilly-dallying. I definitely recommend getting a soft mat to stand on. Prior to getting it, my legs just yelled at me all day long.

For digital art, I use a Wacom Intuos3 4"x5" tablet. I like to physically hand-draw certain pieces of art - set pieces, static images, large-scale work. For that, I have Faber Castell Pitt pens, a set of four black pens. They're smooth, they dry quickly, and their different sizes cover my needs. To digitize the finished work, I throw it into my HP Deskjet 3050a scanner.

I like to be mobile and work outside of my office. For that, I have an ASUS laptop. It has an Intel i5 CPU (2.30 Ghz) with 6 GB RAM, with a 15.6" 1366x768 monitor. It works well, and it's able to take care of just about everything my desktop can do.

I have a 13-inch MacBook I use for making Mac ports and testing.

And what software?

My computers use Windows 7 for their operating systems. For Subversion version control, I use TortoiseSVN.

When programming, I spend most of my time with Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express and Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express. For my Mac ports, I use XCode and MonoDevelop. I use VirtualBox when I need to take care of Linux ports.

For 3D modeling work, I use Blender 2.49b. My exporters and plugins are all built for this version, so that's been keeping me from upgrading to a newer Blender.

For 2D art, I use a prehistoric Photoshop 5.5.

Audio work is done in Audacity.

I use Notepad++ for text editing. I had been using OpenOffice for documents and spreadsheets, but have recently started moving things over to Google Docs. It's convenient to be able to access my documents when I only have my phone on me.

What would be your dream setup?

I'd like a large-scale monitor, to have the benefit of more screen real estate with the convenience of having just one monitor. I often need multiple windows open at the same time, and having them all displayed on one mega monitor would be ideal for me.

I'd also like the monitor to be rotateable from landscape mode to portrait mode. When I'm coding or writing something extensive, I often wish I could get more vertical screen space.

Finally, I'd find it useful to have a large-scale scanner. My current scanner accepts standard-sized documents just fine, but exotic paper sizes are out of luck. A big hefty scanner would be great.