Jason RohrerInterview
Game developer (Passage)
Adapted from Jason Rohrer's interview on Uses This, published 25 February 2010. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
My main computer these days is a broken Dell Inspiron 4100 that my sister was going to throw away---I got it for free.
I also have a PowerComputing 250 MHz PPC Mac Clone (remember those?) with 128 MiB of RAM that I use occasionally for backups and testing.
When I want to do an official Mac build of a game, I turn on my wife's old first-generation iMac (tray-loading), to ensure that the build will work on PPC machines too (I don't want to make an Intel-only build).
Browser
For slide presentations, I use Firefox in full-screen mode (I have coded a little HTML template that puts "back" and "next" links at the top of each HTML slide).
Notes
When I need to typeset something, like a design document or an invoice, I use LaTeX.
Coding & Development
Design
Media
Other
The most well-known game of the bunch is Passage.
Windows XP has a habit of doing this to people over the years---slowing down to the point where they feel like they need new computers!
On the other partition, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn), which is my main development OS, and what I boot into almost every day.
Actually, I'm running Xubuntu, which is just Ubuntu with a lighter-weight desktop environment.
Simple Directmedia Layer+ 1 other
In terms of libraries, I use SDL for graphics/sound/input and OpenGL if I need to draw polygon-based graphics.
On Windows, I've also made some of my games (my small, 1-week "sketches") using GameMaker, which is absolutely amazing.