Jonathan Dearborn is a gameplay and tools programmer with over 14 years of game development experience, specializing in Unreal, Unity, C++, C#, and SDL/SDL_gpu. He designs and ships gameplay systems and engines—ranging from indie mobile and educational titles to large VR projects—while also mentoring students and teams through hands-on teaching roles. Jonathan has a strong physics background (MS in Physics) that informs thoughtful, physics-driven gameplay and reflective design decisions. He contributes to open-source graphics tooling—fixing texture handling and adding GPU primitives to the widely used sdl-gpu library—which underpins his low-level graphics and cross-platform expertise. Based in Greater Boston, he balances independent product work with studio and contract roles, and is known for turning prototypes into polished releases and practical tooling.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts, Physics, Bachelor of Arts, Physics at State University of New York College at Potsdam
Master of Science, Physics, Master of Science, Physics at University of New Hampshire
A library for high-performance, modern 2D graphics with SDL written in C.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Graphics Library Contributor
Contributions:5 releases, 768 commits, 27 PRs in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jonathan made several contributions to the `sdl-gpu` library, including fixing image filtering and addressing edge seam artifacts in the OpenGLES_1 blitting code. They implemented NPOT (non-power-of-two) texture support, improved surface loading on Windows, and refactored the code for image and target management. Moreover, the user added GPU_Ellipsis and GPU_EllipseFilled along with an OpenGL-based test application.
The main repository for the Open Source game Openglad.
Contributions:1 release, 525 commits, 2 PRs in 7 years 5 months
gameopen-source-game
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Jonathan Dearborn - Gameplay And Tools Programmer at DinoMage Games