caelan gadwah-meaden
narrative & systems designer
Haven’s Toll: Doomslay
Mechanics Design
Technical Art & Animation
a 2.5D side-scrolling dress-up mystery game where players analyze styles of cult members to build relationships and get information. Realizing that the doomsday that the cult predicts is real, the player has the choice to continue investigating the mystery, or to enjoy dressing up and making friends until the world ends.
Details
Genre: 2.5D Narrative Dress-up game
Engine: Unity
Platform: PC, Mac, Browser
Tools Used: Photoshop, Twine, Pixel Crushers Dialogue System
Team: 4 people.
1 Lead Programmer/Producer, 1 Art Director/2D Artist, 1 Writer, & Myself.
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Starting the project, my main listed roles were writer and game designer, but I was happy to be able to jump between disciplines and do lots of exciting work. By the end of the project, my producer said that at times, he felt like I was a co-producer due to my knowledge of all aspects of the project, and what needed to be done when.
- In order to achieve one of our core pillars, giving the players the option to not engage with the mystery in our narrative, I led a game design push to increase the fun of the dress-up aspects of the game, ensuring that they didn’t just have the option, but would actually consider pursuing it. It was close to release, so I pitched and helped implement small changes that would make a big difference in the joy found in our systems.
- To help communicate our narrative, I storyboarded and animated a two minute cutscene, communicating with our art director during the process.
Play on itch!
03:00
Sole Developer
a 2D game with an unimaginable number of jokes made by mice where players navigate the internet, represented by an empty void of doors, opening to reveal rooms full of chattering mice who share their darkest secrets or lightest musings. Players navigate by spatial sound, listening for the music coming from inside each room. When the character is struck with an anxiety attack, players must sync their movement with the wind to recover.
a 2D game with an unimaginable number of jokes made by mice where players navigate the internet, represented by an empty void of doors, opening to reveal rooms full of chattering mice who share their darkest secrets or lightest musings. Players navigate by spatial sound, listening for the music coming from inside each room. When the character is struck with an anxiety attack, players must sync their movement with the wind to recover.
Details
Genre: Experimental Narrative Game
Engines: GameMaker
Platform: PC
This game was developed independently.
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In this three week project, I designed exploration mechanics to reflect my own feeling of using the internet to distract myself from anxiety in order to fall asleep. I entered a flow state and transcended this realm of existence to write one liners for dozens and dozens of mice and even some other creatures.
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I see the internet as a landscape of its own, with countless isolated yet deeply connected public spaces, full of absurdity and deep honesty. Until I accessed one of these spaces, I would feel deeply alone in my dark bed, a feeling that I recreated using spatial audio as the only means of navigating these spaces, and by having rooms not even appear in the dark void until they’ve been entered.
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When the cat is struck by an anxiety attack, they are teleported to a new room, often with some threat, and they must avoid or flee this threat while syncing their movement with strong gusts of wind, which push them backwards unless they stop moving and sit down. I am proud of this representation of anxiety!
a systems-diagram game made in Machincations in which players send members of a dwindling villager population to fight vampires, whose population grows with each battle they win. Players have to manage resources, which the vampires will steal if left unattended, designate roles to new villagers, train warriors, and farm garlic in a web of interconnected systems in order to defeat the vampires.
Details
Genre: Action-Strategy Systems Game
Engines: Machinations
This project was designed independently.
A brief explanation of the system:
This system started from the core idea of a lost battle resulting in a two person swing, you losing one person, and the enemy gaining them. The player begins with a 5% win rate, and increases it at first by forging weapons, which can be stolen by vampires if the player doesn’t move them fast enough, resulting in the opposite effect. Players can also raid vampires, resulting in a 5% swing, but only have a 40% success chance. After forging 100 weapons, the player can send warriors off to training (leaving the battle, which could lose them the game) to increase this chance.
Once the player increases their win percentage to above 75%, the vampires become desperate and start to have vampire sex, creating more vampire troops and increasing vampire morale, and thus their win rate. This can be mitigated by making warriors leave battle to become garlic farmers, increasing the vampire infertility rate, but is perhaps better prevented by balancing the player win rate just below 75%.
Here is a breakdown of my design process and philosophy.
The Bathrooms
a walking simulator that parodies the backrooms and examines fortune-telling. The player navigates a bathroom themed world that they and several others have suddenly found themselves in, journeying toward the only goal they can find: A cat that stole the moon and tells fortunes. Each character has unique and mixed feelings about getting their fortune told, but all move slowly towards the cat, no matter how apprehensive.
Details
Genre: Walking Simulator
Engines: Unity
Platform: Browser
This project was designed independently.
- A balance of silly, sincere, and tragic, The Bathrooms is a distillation of what and how I like to write.
- It features absurd characters in an absurd world who manage to be grounded and who’s emotions feel real. The challenges they face are serious, and players can connect with them, while laughing at them in the same moment.
Systems Balancing
Writing
a crunchy tabletop deck-builder where players race to make out with the most monsters in the club. Each monster is associated with a different playstyle and has a shop from which players buy cards each turn. Players choose which monsters to plant their kisses on, filling up their Make-Out Meters. Once a Make Out Meter is full, players score points and get a special card from the monster, the meter resets, and its capacity increases.
Details
Genre: Deckbuilder
Platform: Tabletop!
Team: 5 people. 1 Producer, 1 Lead Game Designer, 1 Artist, 1 Graphic Designer, & Myself.
- An ongoing project, we tabled at PlayNYC 2025, and are planning to speak to publishers soon!
- MOM, as we refer to it, is a sexy-comedy tabletop game with some level of mechanical complexity, though intended for deckbuilder beginners. As the person in charge of writing our rulebook, balancing comedic tone with clear explanation was a fun challenge.