Kalani Staudacher

Last year I took a class called "Game Design Workshop" at USC. This was a class made for game design majors, most of whom were planning to make video games someday. However, the class focused on studying theory of play, not programming. A core tenet of the class was that games are games; a good game designer should be able to make an understandable physical protype of their game, whether they are designing video games or board games. I mention this as background because I admire this philosophy. I've usually studied interactive systems through the lens of programming, which is good for modelling interactions. However, encouraging us to try and think of game systems without computation expanded my view of how games works, how we can model systems, and how interactions take place in the world. This is something that's very important to me. What I love to study is how different components of a system interact to make a greater whole, and that's exactly what a game is.

I worked on "Keep Dealing and Nobody Explodes" as part of the class's final group project. I was the lead art designer for the team, although I also helped with the game design and rules. It was a great team to be a part of and our team lead, Eric, was a talented game designer. He came up with the game idea and most of the rules. Here's a link to the rules of the game. We had a more polished rule booklet, but I'm not sure where it is. "Keep Dealing and Nobody Explodes" a face paced, high tension card game.

As the lead art designer, I was responsible for designing all the cards for the game. Below is a sampling of some of them.