Cameryn Tuliao
I'm a game designer with narrative design skills, based in South Essex, England. I'm an IG50 winner 2024, a Narrative Department alumni and a previous BAFTA YGD winner. I graduated from Aberty University with First Class Honours in 2023 for Game Design and Production.This is my Game Design Portfolio. If you wish to look at my Narrative Design skills, please re-direct yourself to my Narrative Design Portfolio.
Desert Angels
Desert Angels is a third-person, story-driven exploration game set in a desert scrapyard. There's a generator buried in the scrapyard that can restore power to your village's water purification system, and save your people. Uncover the scrapyard's memories — or blast those memories to pieces — to find it.Roles: Narrative Designer, Additional Writing, QA
Team: 5 members
Development: 1 year
High Card Heist
A TTRPG game that uses a custom system of 52 playing cards deck about heisting a vault. It takes 2 hours to play between a GM and 2-4 players. It’s best described as an RPG, RNG experience, as every mechanic is based on the luck of the cards. Recently published on DriveThruRPG.Roles: Solo Developer
Development: 2 months
Net Carbon
An educational platformer game about carbon capture storage, and how to save energy around the house. It was made for young children, and was showcased in COP 26; Glasgow, Scotland.Roles: Game Designer, Narrative Designer
Team: 4 members
Development: 7 weeks
Current Project: Red RAIN
Currently I'm a game designer for Small Loans Studio, a collective of game developers collaborating to create small games aimed to be released for free on Steam. I've worked with this studio since it's inception, working previously as a game designer for The Tūn-Gāst of Oakshaw. With my time working at The Tūn-Gāst of Oakshaw ending soon, I am working on Small Loan Studio's next project, Red Rain.Red Rain is a single-player, 3rd-person RPG set in the ruins of a post-Yellowstone supereruption North America. This game focuses on a compelling tale about a mother-daughter relationship whilst traversing a postapocalyptic yet beautiful wasteland as both a competent survivalist, and a child who will inherit the new world.
Net Carbon
Genre: Platformer, Education
Engine: Unity
Roles: Narrative Designer, Game Designer
Team: 4 members
Development: 7 weeks
Live your life. Capture carbon. Store it into the ground. An educational game about Carbon Capture Storage, made in collaboration with Abertay University, and SSE Thermal.
Net Carbon is an educational game about the carbon capture storage pipeline and how to save energy around the house. The main target audience were young children around primary school ages (5 years old to 12 years old). The game was a client project created for SSE Thermal, and was made under the supervision of Abertay University. Additionally, it was also hosted at COP 26 in 2021, Glasgow Scotland and is currently used at schools to explain the Carbon Capture Process.
Game Designer Responsibilities:
Design and iterate with the other designer on how the mini-games would work, and how they could explain the carbon capture storage pipeline.
Discuss with SSE Thermal on the carbon capture storage pipeline and how to improve the minigames to reflect the pipeline as closely as possible.
Develop the onboarding for the minigames to allow the player to understand the instructions, and purpose of the game within a first glance. (Inspiration for this was games such as WarioWare and Mario Party.)
Write QA black box and white box test for the playtesters before the COP 26 release.
Narrative Designer Responsibilities:
Research environmental facts that were interesting enough to catch a child's attention, but were still connected to household chores/objects.
Communicate with SSE Thermal on a weekly basis to discuss my research, and my attempts to condense the information for young children.
Iterate on the changes and feedback given by the SSE Thermal team, such as when the information was too dense.
Create the headings for the information short, snappy and ideally with alliteration to grab the children's attention.
Game Design Breakdown
For Net Carbon I was not the only game designer on this team. As such, I will focus on my contributions, which were the mini-games used in the game. Designing the mini-games was an interesting challenge, as we wanted to represent the Carbon Capture Storage pipeline. As a result, I had to look at the pipeline to think outside the box for educational and fun mini-games.
Mini-Game One: Stripping the Carbon
One of the first ideas was looking at the pipeline where Co2 was stripped into two sections, Co2 and the solvent so that they can be transported to different uses of the pipeline. The solvent would be used for further utilisation, and the Co2 would be sent to into storage.I designed a sorting game to mimic the “stripping of the Co2”. I created an illustration to make the point clearer during a voice call with the team and explained the mechanics there. At the time, I wasn’t too sure what the solvent was. All I knew was that the separation in the pipeline could be a good idea to gamify.The team approved of the idea as it was easy to understand, and quick to solve. This mini-game then moved to a vertical slice to ensure that it was possible by the programmers before the client approved it.Once the client approved of the mini-game, the team and I focused on polishing the mini-game. The polish was less on refining the mechanics but more refining the presentation to ensure that the player can understand it with a look. We took major inspirations from WarioWare with their one word instruction, and things like the Mario Party series as the mini-games there were also fast of nature, and were made for children.
Mini-Game Two: Transporting the Carbon
One of the other ideas was transporting the Co2 into the storage deep underground. Stardew Valley’s Fishing mini-game inspired this mechanic. However, since there were people in the team that didn’t play Stardew Valley I created a demonstration and elaborated on how the mechanic would work and how it would differ from Stardew Valley’s mechanic.Once the team understood the mechanic, they approved of the ideas and we created a proof of concept mechanic within the unity engine.The client approved of the mini-game so we focused on polishing the presentation, including the illustrations to emphasis what part of the CSS pipeline we were doing. I once again looked at WarioWare’s one word instructions to make it easier to understand for the target audience.
Desert Angels
Genre: Walking Sim, Adventure
Engine: Unity
Roles: Narrative Designer, Additional Writer, QA
Team: 5 members
Development: 1 year
Desert Angels is a third-person, story-driven exploration game set in a desert scrapyard. There's a generator buried in the scrapyard that can restore power to your village's water purification system, and save your people. Uncover the scrapyard's memories — or blast those memories to pieces — to find it.
Responsibilities:
Create item descriptions for the relics compendium found by the player which further explores the world and their connection to the characters.
Write black out poetry as an extension for the item descriptions. This is shown to the player when the player blows up a relic.
Playtest the game with every new build to check for bugs and errors, focusing on areas such as gameplay, narrative and user experience.
Showcased the game throughout multiple events such as Game Dev Local Expo, GameDev Lisbon and Develop Brighton 2025 at Brilliant Indie Treasures.
High Card Heist
TTRPG System: Custom card system
Role: Solo Developer
Development: 3 months
Created for the PocketQuest Jam 2024, High Card Heist is a TTRPG game that uses a custom system that only needs 2 decks of the standard 52 playing cards. It’s made for 1 Game Master, and 2-4 players with sessions lasting around 2 hours of gameplay. The premise of the game is a group of thieves are attempting to steal from a vault that the players create themselves.
The game is best described as an RPG, RNG experience. Everything from the vault, GM’s obstacles, and player stats are determined by the luck of the cards. The system also includes another mechanic where the players can sacrifice their stats to boost their skills in order to succeed in an action against the GM. I’ve included two examples of plays to showcase two mechanics most common in the game.
Game Designer Responsibilities:- Research games, themes and tropes used in the Heist genre for mechanic and design reasons.
- Design and develop all the mechanics and how the luck of playing cards along with player numbers can affect the gameplay.
- Constant iteration with the system through play testing and gathering feedback to make sure everything is balanced.
- Communicating to both the artists and layout designer to keep track of everything happening in the pipeline.
Narrative Designer Responsibilities:- Research games, themes and tropes used in the Heist genre for narrative reasons.
- Develop the narrative pull to the game and intertwining the roleplay aspect of the game with the different mechanics.
- Create different narrative prompts for the GM to assist them with the play session, especially if they are new to GM-ing and the Heist Genre.
- Write all the rules, systems within the rulebook so that it’s easy to understand.
Game Design Breakdown
This section is to elaborate some of the mechanics I have developed for my TTRPG game, High Card Heist.
Counting Cards- This mechanic in High Card Heist is the core gameplay for the game. Taken from the card game, War, players and the GM simply needs the highest number between them to win during a turn.- Here, 2-10 cards are respectively 2-10, Jacks are 11, Queens are 12, Kings are 13, and Aces are 14.- RNG aspect: The GM pulls the difficulty cards from their deck, and the player stats were based on their luck from the start of the game.This mechanic had to be balanced several times thanks to consistent feedback from play testing. Previously, the face cards had the same value of 10. This allowed players to have easy access to high numbers. As a result, I bumped up the face cards along with the Ace card. When this happened, it made the game more fair between players and the GM.
Boosted Cards MechanicThis mechanic for High Card Heist demonstrates how RNG of the cards determines everything in the game, and how players can sacrifice their stats to overcome the challenges in front of them.Player 2 can only remove 2 cards when the difficulty was 3 cards due to balancing issues with the boosted mechanic spotted during a play testing session. Originally, players could boost as many cards as the difficulty (3 card difficulty = 3 cards boost), but the result left the mechanic broken, and easy for the players to exploit.
Shell Shuffle
Genre: Puzzle, 3D-Match
Engine: Unity
Roles: Game Designer
Team: 5 members
Development: 72 hours
This game was created for the Mini-Jam 159 with the theme of "Ocean". We incorporated the limitation 'as small as possible', we decided to create a twist on traditional merge game mechanics by creating shells of different sizes across the grid, and making the required limitation quite literally the aim of the game! Players must manage their board and create the smallest possible sets of shells from larger shells, as well as merge their different variations.
Responsibilities:
Create and maintain the entire game design document.
Design and develop all the mechanics and different resources and how they all relate to each other for the gameplay.
Design and develop the tutorial for the game, along with the programmer.
Implemented the game mechanics into the Unity Engine.
Game Design Breakdown
As I was working with another individual for Shell Shuffle's game design, I will focus on my main contribution, which was the game economy and the mechanics. If you wish to read the GDD of this game, check out this page.
Game Mechanics
Shell Shuffle is a merging game that has mechanics inspired by existing merging games such as Merging Dragons and Love and Pies.Source ItemsThere are two items in the game that act as “sources” for the other resources that would be merged in the game. One of the sources are Corals. Corals would produce pufferfish and once merged they will become a bomb used to break up shells.The other source item is a Treasure Chest. The Treasure Chest would produce a large shell that would need to be broken into smaller shells to fit the theme of the game jam.Merging in 3sSimilar to the mechanics of Merging Dragons, the only way to merge items to create new things is to have 3 of the same objects be placed right next to each other. By doing it like this, it ensures that there would also be free space.Swapping PositionsSwapping Positions allows items that take one singular space to be swapped with each other. This was implemented to allow quick merging between the items.BinFurthermore, by including a bin as a whirlpool, it would allow bigger items such as big shells to be removed. It also allows objects to be freed up if the players believe that their merging space feels too clustered and dense.
Game Economy
Shell Shuffle has a game economy to provide further clarity on the logic and relationship with the items and the mechanics. As a result, I created a table to make it extremely clear on the relationship between the merging mechanics and the items that can be interacted.
| Source of Items | Item | How many merges | Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coral | Pufferfish | 3 pufferfishes | BubbleBomb |
| Coral | Octopus | 3 Octopus | Ink |
| Treasure Chest | Big Shell | Big shell + BubbleBomb | 2 Medium Shells |
| Big Shell | 2 Medium Shell | Medium Shell + BubbleBomb | 4 different coloured small shells |
| Medium Shell | 4 Small shell | 3 of the same coloured shell | Custom Shell |
| Small shell | Custom Shell | Custom shell + ink | Inked Shell |
Shell Breakdown:Big Shell -> 2 Medium Shell (Shell A, Shell B) ->Medium Shell A -> Red Small Shell, Blue Small ShellMedium Shell B -> Green Small Shell, Yellow Small Shell
StarTales
Genre: Visual Novel, Puzzle
Engine: Unity
Role: Narrative Designer, Game Designer
Team: 4 members
Development: 2 weeks
In a night of reminiscing, connect the stars to retell the story of how the band StarTales came to be...
StarTales is a short visual novel game with a puzzle minigame that recounts the story about how a group of highschool students became a local band. The game was created for the Narrative Driven Jam. The Jam's theme was Warm Feelings with additional themes of puzzles and diegetic music. For this game jam, I was both the game designer and the narrative designer, however the main hat I wore was the narrative designer.
Game Designer Responsibilities:- Design the different mechanics for the game.
- Design the different puzzles and how it works with the story.
- These puzzles were simple, connect-the-dots minigames using star constellations.
- The minigames helped bookend the arc, and also act as the transition to the next story arc.
Narrative Designer Responsibilities:- Create a narrative document that has information about the overall plot, story arcs and conflicts in the story.
- Create and develop two female characters.
- Work with another writer (who is in charge of the male characters) to ensure that we're on the same page regarding the plot, and character development.
- Write the script for the entire story, including the introduction and epilogue of the game.
Game Design Docs
Shell Shuffle GDD
This is a Game Design Document for Shell Shuffle. Shell Shuffle was created for a Mini-Jam 159. It was created and maintained by me throughout the development of the game.
Botline Blitz GDD
This is a Game Design Document for Botline Blitz. Botline Blitz was a game jam created for a PirateSoftware Game Jam. Whilst the team didn't manage to execute a proper deliverable, we wanted to submit a GDD that was required for submission.
Apoco-party: Design
Apoca-Party is a light-hearted resource management game created for the Summer Slow Jam. The game focuses on Cthulhu, who is acting as a party host for the end of the world. As Cthulhu, the player has to keep track of various things such as the music, food, drinks and any mishaps that occur in order to keep the vibe of the party up for when Azathoth wakes up. Failure to keep the vibes up, the party is considered a failure, and Azathoth becomes too depressed to end the world.
Games
Please click on any of the games to learn about my responsibilities, and what I learnt from the project.
Desert Angels
Desert Angels is a third-person, story-driven exploration game set in a desert scrapyard. There's a generator buried in the scrapyard that can restore power to your village's water purification system, and save your people. Uncover the scrapyard's memories — or blast those memories to pieces — to find it.Genre: Walking Sim, Adventure
Roles: Narrative Designer
Team: 5 Members
Development: 1 year
Net Carbon
An educational platformer game about carbon capture storage, and how to save energy around the house. It was made for young children, and was showcased in COP 26; Glasgow, Scotland.Genre: Education, 2D Platformer
Roles: Narrative Designer, Game Designer
Team: 4 members
Development: 6 weeks
High Card Heist
A TTRPG game that uses a custom system of 52 playing cards deck about heisting a vault. It takes 2 hours to play between a GM and 2-4 players. It’s best described as an RPG, RNG experience, as every mechanic is based on the luck of the cards.Roles: Solo Developer
Development: 2 months
Other Projects
Shell Shuffle
A merging game created for the Mini-Jam Theme: Ocean. For this jam we had to implement the limitation, "As small as possible."Genre: Puzzle, Match-3
Roles: Game Design
Team: 5 members
Development: 72 hours
StarTales
StarTales is a short visual novel with puzzle minigames that recounts the story about how a group of highschool students became a local band.Genre: Visual Novel, Puzzle
Roles: Narrative Designer, Game Designer
Team: 4 members
Development: 2 weeks
About
My name is Cameryn Tuliao. I'm a non-binary game developer who uses any pronouns (she/he/they) and I am game designer with a background in narrative design.If you want to see my focused portfolio on narrative design, click here.In my spare time, I like to read Korean manhwa and webnovels, go to the gym and play video games. My favourite genres are roguelikes, resource managers, and RPGs.
Testimonials
Cameryn was one of the most helpful and friendly people I have met in the gamedev community. They were always open to partake in a conversation and shine a positive light, but it didn't end there. Cameryn was usually one of the first people to reach out and highlight other people's strengths and wins, and it was uplifting on all levels. On top of that, the amount of effort and heart they put into their work is unmatched and it shows in everything they produced. Cameryn is the ideal member of any game or narrative design team!- Mario Mergola. The Narrative Department
Awards
IG50 Design & Narrative Winner (2024)
BAFTA Young Game Designer, Game Concept award (2015)