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A picture of Zach Gage

Zach Gage

Game developer, artist

in artist, developer, game, mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Zach Gage, I make videogames and art.

What hardware do you use?

I actually just did a total overhaul on my extremely-aged digital setup a few months ago so it's all probably a little boring --- I use a 13" 2017 MacBook Pro, a 5K LG UltraFine display. I prop my MacBook up on an old IndieBox box. I keep cool with a Vornado Zippi fan which was harvested from a friend's company when they moved offices. It sounds exactly like a physical hard-drive reading and writing a ton of data when it's on. I also have an old Vew-Do balance board for keeping me focused on long calls.

I work at a standing desk that is built out of a desk my dad made a long time ago with some MultiTable legs on it. I use a Drobo 5N2 for backup.

I use a Magic Mouse 2 and a Apple extended keyboard (wired).

And what software?

I develop my games with Unity, Visual Studio, Dash, and obviously Xcode.

For the art and web stuff I use Adobe Creative Cloud (mostly Photoshop and Illustrator. Sometimes Dreamweaver and InDesign) and Glyphs (in most of my games I use fonts as my sprite-sheets so I can use Text Mesh Pro to handle their scaling).

For day to day FTP stuff I use Transmit and sometimes Coda.

For font management (super important!) I use FontExplorer X.

For building sound effects I use Logic Pro X.

For trailers, Final Cut Pro X.

Direct Mail is a lifesaver for sending out big press blasts.

I spend a lot of time on Slack to keep my sanity while working alone in my apartment. Also Tweetbot helps there.

I keep all my to-do lists in TextEdit.

Backblaze has saved my bacon once or twice.

ColorSnapper 2 is so handy for matching colors when moving between Unity and the Adobe products.

And Fantastical 2 keeps my schedule organized!

What would be your dream setup?

I wish my NAS could run Plex adequately, I had an external thunderbolt GPU for my laptop, and someone would come over with a magic box that would compile my Xcode builds faster.