Who are you, and what do you do?
Hi, I'm Steve Gaynor and I'm co-founder of an independent video game studio called The Fullbright Company. I was the writer and designer of our first game, Gone Home, which came out in 2013. Before going indie I worked on the BioShock series for a number of years.
What hardware do you use?
I work on a PC with Windows 7 64-bit installed. The machine isn't super ultra mega high-spec: an Intel i5-3570k CPU at 3.4ghz, 8 gigs of RAM, an NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti video card with 1gb of video RAM, and 3 hard drives totaling about 3.5 TB of storage. I have two monitors, one that's 16x9 aspect ratio and one that's 4x3 for testing the game and our website at different dimensions. I use a standard wired Microsoft 2-button mouse, a backlit Logitech keyboard, a wired Xbox 360 controller, and powered noise-canceling Bose QC15 headphones. My monitor stands are piles of hardback books and magazines.
And what software?
We made the game using the Unity engine, which we have 4.x pro licenses for. I also use Audacity for editing sound, Photoshop CS5 for editing images, Perforce for source control, Notepad++ for editing text, and occasionally Maya for editing 3D stuff. Steam is always running, and Chrome is my web browser.
What would be your dream setup?
Honestly I'm pretty happy with what I've got! As we go forward I wouldn't mind upgrading some of my hardware (ram, video card, processor) as need be but my OS is on a solid state drive and I don't do anything that's mega taxing on my system. It's a good thing to have a machine that a fairly high-end gamer might have, but that isn't so overpowered that you can't tell if your game is poorly optimized without loading it up on a target spec machine. I actually would like to replace my 16x9 monitor with something that displays higher res than 1920x1080 -- I know some gamers are already playing on higher res monitors than that, and we had to go to a friend's office to test the game on their high-res displays to see if there were any bugs with the game at >1080p!