Doug Kavendek - Portfolio

I fell in love with computers when I first figured out how to create modifications for the Doom engine on my dusty old 486. I quickly became ensnared in level creation for Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Half-Life -- the act of creating my own worlds was extremely satisfying, and still is a driving force behind a lot of what I try to do on the computer. Soon, my interests began to expand as I started playing around with things like QBASIC and C in high school. Coding, which had seemed entirely inexplicable previously, suddenly became both attainable and fun. To make a long story horrendously short, this ultimately led to my Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in computer science, both from Stevens Institute, where I was determined to find as many excuses to turn programming assignments into either games or simulations.

Flash website for Syandus, with a view of the simulation I scripted

At my latest employer, Syandus, I was involved with many different facets of the company. Their main business was interactive, real-time medical simulations, so I handled the scripting behind 3D and 2D scenes in their latest product. I worked on the application platform itself as well, by creating a new guide system which was used to provide feedback, hints, and navigation to the user to nudge them towards their objectives. I also became heavily involved in rewriting their old Win32 launcher application, making it data-driven through XML files (so it could easily be re-used for multiple projects), as well as providing extensive new functionality. The increase in flexibility made it well suited for a new direction the company took, utilizing online delivery of new products, with the launcher as the central 'hub' for all of it. This brought with it much additional database work with MySQL, with PHP as a back-end for some aspects. Additionally, I created the new company website, using Flash and Actionscript to bring together the various images, videos, and sound.

Terrain in The Mystery of Ah D'no

For my senior project at Stevens, as the lead programmer I worked on a role-playing game entitled The Mystery of Ah D'no where I was wholly responsible for a terrain generator and renderer, as well as code integration. Working on a deadline that was entirely unfeasible for the feature set we had planned really demonstrated the importance of a reasonable design plan, in addition to showing me how difficult it can be to coordinate even just a few people on a relatively large programming project. All of the remarkably late nights were entirely worth it, though, once I was able to run around in the terrain that I had made from scratch.

Using the console in Zomgrels while the AI plays some Tetris

I am currently working on a new code framework, with the placeholder name Zomgrels (for lack of a better name), that I can use for my subsequent games, to make the entire process easier. Menu pages for user interaction can be created with fairly simple markup in a text file, user-defined controls and variable configurations can easily be defined and persist between executions, various media initialization (such as textures, audio, and fonts) is abstracted further, and an intuitive console can be used to access most functionality directly. Also, to test out the system with an actual game, I recreated Tetris, along with a simple AI that manages to play a pretty good game on its own.

Over-the-top gore in Bumfight

My current goal is to integrate my new framework with my existing code for a game I had created with some friends, Bumfight. It is a somewhat offensive side-scrolling multiplayer platformer, where you play as bums who run, jump, and climb around in search of weapons and powerups with which to defeat all the other challengers so as to earn money. Supports up to 4 players splitscreened, has a few different game modes, and is reminiscent of an old SNES game, except with far more physics effects. Knock some skulls!

Erosion and exaggerated discoloration in my Weathering simulator

I also did some research during my time as a graduate student, combining several ideas concerning erosion and aging to simulate the weathering of polygonal models. I created a system where large numbers of particles would interact efficiently with models in a scene, deforming and coloring the meshes. Part of the goal was to also integrate other student's work involving fluid dynamics so as to create fluid fields that would interact with the particles as well, and to make it more useful to the user I created ways to render the field so as to make the flows more easily discernable.

Testing flocking world, using Ah D'no terrain

Dodging some enemies in Captain Awesome

In the weathering simulation, particles move through a vector field, visualized by an animated slice of the field

Animated character support in Ah D'no

Special effects generated with non-photorealistic photon magnets

An early take on flocking, with basic obstacle avoidance