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A picture of Martin Jonasson

Martin Jonasson

Game developer

in developer, game, mac, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Martin, I make little videogames all by myself in Malmö, Sweden. I've always been fascinated with making technology do my bidding, be it programming or making art. I also quite enjoy entertaining others, so a career in games made a lot of sense for someone like me.

I've made games and game like things ever since I got my ten year old hands on a computer, but didn't really consider it being "a thing you can do" until it was time to study at university.

Fast forward ten years or so (a couple at various web development agencies) and here we are. I make games independently and full time. It's great.

What hardware do you use?

Most of my work happens on my office desktop, a boring old Windows 10 PC, built and upgraded from various parts ever since I first got it in 2014. But since I do make things for iOS I also have keep a surprisingly snappy 2013 MacBook Air around.

I used to have a very loud all black Das Keyboard but ever since I started sharing an office with other humans, I've had to switch to much quieter CODE mechanical keyboard.

I use two side by side 27" monitors, the primary one is a 4K Dell P2815Q and the secondary is a Dell U2713H. Both are attached to third party monitor arms because I'm tall and I need my monitors much higher up than the stock feet can do.

I more or less live inside my noise canceling headphones (Bose QuietComfort 35) - I'd wear them to bed if they weren't so bulky.

For backups and general I use two Synology NAS boxes, one at home and one at the office, which sync between each other. I also recently got myself an HP Z420 desktop machine to run as a server for virtual machines. It's not really doing all that much yet, but the idea is to use it for builds and general serving of things.

I'm on a Pixel 3 XL for a phone and an oldish iPad for a tablet. I like this combo because I can stay on top of both major mobile operating systems while avoiding simply having two phones.

And what software?

My latest game is my first Unity game, so there's a lot of that. I use JetBrains Rider to write C# for my games. For a general text editor, there's still nothing that beats good old Sublime Text.

I make frequent use of git and bash through ConEmu, which gives you a regular old terminal on your Windows box. If I'm feeling a bit more visual, I also use SmartGit for all things version control.

Other than that, the main constant is the Adobe gang - lots of Illustrator, some Photoshop and occasionally Premiere and After Effects. If I'm prototyping animation that usually happens in Flash/Animate.

What would be your dream setup?

I'm more and more becoming a convert to virtualization. I'm dreaming of a day when I can keep my hardware entirely separate from my OS and just have it run on some generic machine tucked away somewhere. Would make backups, versioning and general life so much easier.

Other than that, I don't really need much more than what I have today - my limitations are much more set by imagination/motivation/time than anything else.