On Show Us Your Rig we feature PC gaming's best and brightest as they show us the systems they use to work and play.
A double feature in Show us your rig this week. We've got two members of League of Geeks, the Australian indie studio responsible for digital board game Armello and currently hard at work taking it down the road to version 2.0. You might recognize producer Lisy Kane and community manager Darcy Smith from their Twitch channel where they play Armello with its fans as well as testing out other indie games.
The two rigs they're showing us are very different ones. Darcy has his streaming PC, a relative beast of a thing that lives in a soundproof room in their office. Lisy, as a globetrotting producer, has a gaming laptop assembled by Metabox, an Australian company who put together personalized laptops to their owners' specifications. The point of Show us your rig is to highlight how everybody's PC says something about them, and these two certainly do that.
What's in your PC?
Darcy
GPU: GTX 1080 Ti
RAM: 32 GB
Processor: i7-4770
Lisy
GPU: GTX 970
RAM: 16 GB
Processor: i7-6700, 2.6 GHz
What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup?
Lisy: I have an inordinate amount of plushies on my desk. I have my Dota plushies, I collected them over years of going to conferences. When I go to conferences the WeLoveFine booth has these really cool little Dota 2 plushie boxes and you don't know what's in them, so I'll buy like five of them at a time and I just keep piling my desk with them. I also have this weird ergonomic keyboard but also: stand-up desk. I love my stand-up desk a lot, it's something that when we moved to this studio we requested. Obviously when we work we're at our desks all the time so stand-up desks are really really important to have. What else have I got that's weird? My cool plants, my tomato sauce. It's my emergency tomato sauce. It's very important. I love tomato sauce and if I don't have it I'm very sad. I also have Nando's peri-peri salt. In case of emergencies.
Darcy: I guess it's the microphones and the cameras, the four mics and the four cameras that allow me to easily have people hop into the stream and we get to do nice V/O stuff. The room is quite audio-proof as well. One of our directors the other day came in here and did some recording for a friend's game. That's definitely the most unique aspect of this setup for sure.
It's nicely sound-proof. Does that make it the office 'crying room'?
Darcy: If there was much crying it would be, absolutely. It is first on the block for the crying room, but it's more the phonecall room. And also the room naturally gets used for a bunch of quality testing. When this room's not in use QA will shelter in here and test a bunch of multiplayer features.
What's always within arm's reach on your desk?
Lisy: I usually have, very important, water bottle and hand moisturizer. And because we run Agile [project management system] here a lot of my job is creating tasks, doing schedules. I have a million notebooks, all of my system cards and sharpies. That's another thing that's super important, making sure I have everything ready to go. Usually it's chaotic , usually it's very messy but I've cleaned it up obviously. I still have notepads. All my to-do lists are manual. I've tried digital stuff but I find it much easier with paper.
Darcy: Generally a cup of tea. That's my go-to lately. It's hard to tell when I'll be in the mood to stream or whether it's gonna be a good stream, I've found it really hard to predict that. But for some reason if I just have the tea nearby it just makes everything better. It's also something to do, a bit of a tempo breaker when you're talking to people.
What are you playing right now?
Darcy: On this I've been playing Darkest Dungeon a lot. Darkest Dungeon is made by Red Hook who are pals of ours so it's awesome to check in, because I know they've released a bunch of expansions and stuff like that and it really got its hooks into me. It was very satisfying to return to and keep coming back to as well. I've been spending a lot of time in Darkest Dungeon.
Lisy: Dota 2. Always. As you can probably tell. It's my stable game that I play all the time.
How many hours have you racked up?
Lisy: Over 2,000. I was excited because I clocked over 2,000 the other day. I have friends that have 4,000 or 5,000 hours, not even including Warcraft and Dota 1, this is just Dota 2. That's the game I play the most.
What's your favorite game and why?
Lisy: Can I say Dota? I think Dota's my favorite game because it's not just about the game, it's also the social element. I get to play with friends from Brisbane, I get to play with friends all over the world.
Darcy: My favorite game? This is really putting myself out here, this is gonna be a sensitive topic. I don't want to be torn apart but in terms of favorite, all things encompassed, all things included, I have to be World of Warcraft. That's just because it's such an enormous beast that's grown from one thing to another thing to another thing. I've never seen a game remain so prominent within a genre of games for so long. It's such an amazing piece of work that never stops and that's satisfying to me. It's nice that I can return to it with years passed and it be a totally different landscape and I'll rediscover it again.There's a new expansion coming out so I'm back in. I'm plunging down that whirpool, it's happening.
