Tanzania Ngamia Booty

Today brings the finale to this epic series of two posts on the many connections between Italian eating habits and creating games. Whereas last week I discussed how lasagne influences game design in a good way, today I will talk about all kinds of Italian food. I will explain why programmers should not only fear the dreaded spaghetti, but also the less-known evil of lasagne. And how about pizza and ravioli? What can they learn us about the art of code? Note that I realise that the food metaphors might be slightly lame, but the point of this post is that I think it is important to think about the implications of various structures and methods of programming, and this blogpost is basically just an analysis of some pitfalls and approaches. Most programmers know the term spaghetti code . It refers to a larger code base that is so intertwined, that is it impossible to know how the rest of the code reacts when you change something somewhere. Every line of code might be referencing almost any...

done a new illo inspired by a strip called 'invasion of the flying saucer women' that i drew for eros comics 'head' a few years ago...

This is the first of a series of posts about lasagne. Lasagne is one of the most inspiring things that ever came out of Italy, and thinking about it is truly food for thought (sorry, I know that joke was bad) . In today's post I would like to introduce to you my lasagne theory of game design, followed next week by the lasagne theory of coding. Image from a Tesco lasagne recipe The game design theory I would like to discuss today is probably not super original, but I think lasagne is a useful tool that can be used to analyse a game. The point here is that lasagne contains layers, just like gameplay. A game like our just released  Awesomenauts  at all times has various game systems active in the player's head, and during different phases of gameplay they will vary in prominence and importance. To strike the right balance and make the game fun for a long time, it really helps to recognise and analyse the layers of the lasagne. An example will help to make this clear. Le...