Ryan Mcdonough
Software Engineer Director at jMonkeyEngine
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Mcdonough is a seasoned software engineering director with eight years of experience leading game-focused development teams and shipping real-time graphics systems. As Director at AAAA Games and Release Manager for the widely used jMonkeyEngine project, he blends managerial oversight with hands-on contributions to rendering pipelines and shader optimization. His open-source work improving PBR terrain shaders, ambient occlusion packing, and shadow effects demonstrates deep expertise in graphics programming and performance-minded refactors. He’s also developing a multiplayer action RPG, "The Afflicted Forests," which showcases his end-to-end game design and implementation skills beyond backend systems. Based in the United States and grounded in a Computer and Information Sciences education from Robert Morris University, he pairs technical depth with product-driven leadership. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic engineer who prefers shipping tangible visual improvements that scale across engines and teams.
8 years of coding experience
Computer and Information Sciences, General, Computer and Information Sciences, General at Robert Morris University
Github Skills (11)
javas10
3d-graphics10
game-development10
jmonkeyengine10
glsl10
shader10
3d-engine10
game-engine10
game-dev10
java10
3d10
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
jMonkeyEngine/jmonkeyengine
Jan 2020 - Jan 2023
A complete 3-D game development suite written in Java.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 releases, 44 reviews, 14 commits in 3 years
Contributions summary:Ryan's commits focus on enhancing the JMonkeyEngine's PBR (Physically Based Rendering) pipeline. Their work includes supporting pre-shadow and post-shadow effects, packing ambient occlusion data, and adding desaturation functionality to unshaded materials. Furthermore, the user refactored and optimized PBR terrain shaders using new for-loop functionalities, demonstrating an understanding of shader programming and graphics rendering techniques.
jme3jmonkeyengine3gamegame-developmentjava
yaRnMcDonuts/PBR-Terrain
Feb 2019 - Apr 2021
PBR Terrain shaders for JMonkeyEngine 3. The java-based shader converter utility has been moved to a seperate utility project: https://github.com/yaRnMcDonuts/Afflicted-Scene-Designer-Utilities
Contributions:141 commits, 10 PRs, 142 pushes in 2 years 2 months
shadersdesignerpbrsceneshader
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