I’m not a tech reviewer. Though I thought it might be nice to share my setup with other folks and my thinking behind it.

At my day job I use a Macbook Pro, and I have used a version of this laptop for most of my career. It’s definitely my preferred setup especially in regards to web development. However in my personal life, I have primarily used Windows machines. I am a gamer, and have been since I was a kid. Windows is where it’s at in regards to playing computer games. I have both a desktop gaming PC and a laptop running Windows. Because I want to be able to code & play games on a laptop, sticking with Windows has continued to be the most sensible. With ARM macs one cannot run Windows on it like we used to.

Around 2 years ago I picked up the newly released Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio, which also offered the ability to fold it into a tablet. I also find that in regards to Windows hardware Microsoft tends to make the best quality. I have used other products like the Surface Pro & Surface Book, but the Surface Laptop Studio seemed like a nice balance of a device while still offering a discreet GPU. While I didn’t specifically buy it for the purpose of a tablet, it did seem like a nice idea to try doing my game art content on the same machine I code on, rather than on an iPad. Although in practice this hasn’t really worked out for me. Applications like Aseprite which I love for doing Pixelart, aren’t the most well supported for touch based input. Various controls are hidden behind context menus. When I draw in Aseprite using a mouse, I also can easily use the keyboard for hotkeys to access these controls quickly. When using the device in tablet mode, the keyboard becomes obstructed by the screen. If you compare this to drawing apps on the iPad like Procreate & Pixaki, it feels like a outdated experience. With this I could see myself switch out to a more regular windows laptop. Whether from Dell or from ASUS, in order to get a bit more power for the money.

Overall I’ve been fairly happy with developing stuff on Windows. The Linux Subsystem works pretty well for running Docker, as well as other node & ruby apps. I do still find running some of these things natively in Windows itself can be a pain, but it’s not impossible.

So what does my art workflow look like?

I sometimes draw on my laptop or gaming PC with Aseprite & a mouse. So exporting the PNG into the assets folder of the game is easy enough. Those PNG files then get put into source control so I can easily pull the latest on any machine I work from.

When I use the iPad, I rely on iCloud Drive for file sharing. I save the raw files there, and export the PNGs into a directory that sits on iCloud Drive. This means that I need an internet connection in order to get produced files from my iPad to my development machine. This can also be a little annoying when iCloud is slow on syncing. Sadly I haven’t found OneDrive to be any better.

It’s not the perfect experience, but the drawing process feels much more natural to me in iOS rather than using touch input on Windows.