Dean Calver
Games Designer at Snapshot Games
Bulgaria
Summary
🤩
RockstarDean Calver is a veteran games designer and software engineer with 14 years of professional experience building game systems, graphics pipelines, and tools across studios from Ninja Theory and Splash Damage to Unity, Apple, AMD, and Snapshot Games. He blends deep low-level GPU and engine expertise—having worked on Metal architecture at Apple and Vulkan/compute integrations for AMD’s Radeon Rays SDK—with hands-on game design and level mechanics implementation. Dean contributes to open-source game tooling (notably adding a wgpu backend and font rendering to zig-gamedev’s zgui) and has architected Vulkan backends and shader/test fixes for a widely used ray intersection library. Comfortable leading teams and shipping on console-class titles, he also freelances on eclectic visual effects projects and has a playful history of “herding cats in parallel.” Based in Bulgaria, he pairs pragmatic engineering with creative design sensibilities and a knack for making complex graphics systems feel usable for game creators.
14 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
vulkan10
c-language10
zig10
lib10
glsl10
cprogramming-language10
graphic10
webgpu9
opengl9
game-development9
raytracing9
cross-platform8
build-system8
opencl8
game-dev8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/RadeonRays_SDK
Jul 2016 - Aug 2016
Radeon Rays is ray intersection acceleration library for hardware and software multiplatforms using CPU and GPU
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & System Architect
Back-end Developer & System ArchitectContributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 27 pushes in 7 days
Contributions summary:Dean primarily focused on integrating and enhancing the Vulkan backend for the Radeon Rays SDK, as indicated by the movement of Vulkan-specific code into the main repository. Contributions involved substantial modifications to `device_vkw.cpp` and the creation of `ExecutableVulkan`, suggesting an effort to enable and refine the ray intersection acceleration capabilities on Vulkan-based platforms. Further, the user undertook fixes related to build systems, shader compilation, and unit test updates, including adding support for CL and Vulkan tests, demonstrating architectural changes to the project.
cudacpuraycppamd
zig-gamedev/zig-gamedev
Nov 2022 - Nov 2022
Dev repo for @zig-gamedev libs and sample applications
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 12 commits, 2 PRs in 4 days
Contributions summary:Dean contributed to the `zig-gamedev` repository by adding and modifying code related to the `zgui` library. They integrated a `wgpu` backend to the `zgui` library. The user also made changes to the main file and implemented font rendering with `sokol-zig` and `zgui`.
simdvulkanbullet-physicsziggame-engine
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