Derek Van Vliet
Founder, Technical Director at Get Set Games
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
SeniorDerek Van Vliet is a founder and technical director with 15 years of experience building games, mobile apps and desktop software, best known for leading Get Set Games where titles have been downloaded over 75 million times and generated millions in revenue. He combines hands-on engineering across iOS, Android, Windows and web platforms with product leadership—running teams, partnerships, budgeting and marketing. A longtime game developer, Derek has shipped high-profile licensed and original titles such as Robot Unicorn Attack 3 and Monsters, Inc. Run while also architecting reusable systems and tools. He contributes to open-source tooling for game backends, notably enhancing VaRest to improve REST/JSON workflows in Unreal Engine. Based in Old Toronto, he brings a practical mix of creativity and systems thinking, enjoying thorny technical problems from graphics and 3D interfaces to scalable mobile backends. Colleagues describe him as an entrepreneurially minded engineer who keeps shipping polished products while iterating on developer-facing infrastructure.
15 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
689reputation
24kreached
3answers
8questions
Github Skills (18)
json10
blueprint10
unreal-engine-510
unreal-engine-410
api-design10
rest-client10
cplus10
rest-api10
cpp10
salesforce-rest-api10
cocoa-touch6
android6
feed6
nsdate6
rss6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
ufna/VaRest
Nov 2014 - Jun 2015
REST API plugin for Unreal Engine 4 - we love restfull backend and JSON communications!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 7 PRs, 1 comment in 7 months
Contributions summary:Derek focused on enhancing the VaRest plugin's capabilities for REST API communication within Unreal Engine. They implemented functionality to create and handle Parse-specific JSON objects, including pointer objects, date objects, and deletion operations. Furthermore, they added methods for Facebook authentication data and improved the plugin by incorporating a DELETE request verb and adding UPROPERTY declarations. They also addressed build issues and added functions such as `GetFieldNames` and `MergeJsonObject` to the VaRestJsonObject class.
apiunreal-engineblueprintapi-pluginrestfull
getsetgames/BlueprintReflection
Dec 2014 - May 2017
Contributions:40 commits, 19 pushes, 8 branches in 2 years 5 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.