caelan gadwah-meaden
writer & game 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!
Bloodless
A horror dungeon-crawler in a spreadsheet. Players build a character, then travel through dungeons cell by cell, slaying beasts and trying to stay alive. All logic is automated through spreadsheet macros, with the “cell change” behavior acting as an update function.
Details
Genre: Horror Dungeon Crawler
Platform: Microsoft Excel
This game was developed independently.
- Made in around three weeks, Bloodless was a challenge in many ways. I learned a new programming language, Microsoft’s Visual Basic, had to create tension and atmosphere with just text and colored squares, and had to create dynamic and interesting gameplay with only the interplay of simple numbers and movement on an otherwise stagnant board. All in all, I’m extremely happy with the result!
View 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.
- The dark spaces in the game are only navigable through spatial audio. The game also features side scrolling sections in which the player must fight the wind by sitting in place when it gets too strong. Through these mechanics, a game with a simple restricted control scheme becomes interesting and fun to engage with beyond the silly dialogue.
Help! Vampires Are Turning All of My Friends and Neighbors!
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 Glimpse of the Systems at Work:
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 slowly reaching out to publishers!
- 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.
play360 Playground Games
A booklet of collaboratively designed physical games for use on play360 playgrounds in developing countries. The games are focused on building creativity, communication, and collaboration skills in schoolchildren while still being fun to play.
For more about play360 and their mission, see here.
Details
Genre: Physical playground games!
Team: 9 Game Designers.
- All games in the booklet were collaboratively designed by our team of 9 game designers. Designers would bring a basic game premise, and we would design, playtest, and iterate on each in real time as a group, with all designers offering ideas and transformations to being the game to its final form.
- We worked with an incredible non-profit client on this project, play360, to whom the oft dismissed intersection of fun and learning was critically important. This intersection was our guiding light throughout the design process, along with accessibility, and the client was ultimately ecstatic with the games we delivered!