That's a very big topic. Here are some sites I found to be helpful.
__

In the IGDA's effort to disseminate information relevant to game developers, we 
will post relevant articles submitted by our members. These articles usually 
focus on the issues that the IGDA deals with, as opposed to general how-to or 
technical articles (check out Gamastura instead).
Social Issues:
http://www.igda.org/articles/
Gamasutra (may require free login):
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php
___

Game Dev 101:
http://www.sloperama.com/advice.html
___

RealArcade design suggestions for general game design:
"Critical Elements to Building Great Games for Digital Distribution" - The ESD 
Library is a frequently updated collection of documents 
that are meant to provide game developers with an understanding of what types 
of things are successful in ESD. The more key elements that can be incorporated 
into a game, the higher the probability of great sales.

PRODUCTION ORIENTED ELEMENTS
http://gamedevs.realonearcade.com./esd/index.htm 
In-Game Design Elements
http://gamedevs.realonearcade.com./esd/ingame.htm
10 Things to Remember
http://gamedevs.realonearcade.com./esd/10things.htm
10 Things NOT to Do
http://gamedevs.realonearcade.com./esd/10not.htm
Building a Web Game
http://gamedevs.realonearcade.com./esd/webbuild.htm
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Other sites I know to be popular:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Games/Game_Design/

Cheers,
Darius














-----Original Message-----
From: Eddie Cottongim [mailto:cottonsqueak at earthlink.net] 
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 10:39 AM
To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
Subject: Re: Gaming paper advice sought


Hi Richard,

I did a game demo in Squeak a while back that you can look at here.
 http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3136

Other than using usual good software engineering practices, it would be good
for someone doing gaming to be familar with techniques of simulation. You
can live without this, but you'll spend a lot of time rediscovering certain
concepts (such as discrete vs. continous simulations, for example). A solid
concept of how time is managed is especially important. Many games operate
almost as a function of time. The immediate benefit is keeping simulation
speed stable on different hardware, but also has other nice properties.
Prediction (to combat network latency) can become as simple as evaluating f
(t+200) instead of  f (t) (t is time in milliseconds). Thats not so easy
when time management is spread out all over the place as you would get with
a simple 'step as fast as you can' type implementation.

Hope that helps,
Eddie

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 10:24 PM
Subject: Gaming paper advice sought


> Simon McCallum of this department has designed a 3rd year
> computer games paper, to run as a six week intensive "summer" course.
> Unfortunately, the platform (Windows XP), the programming environment
> (Visual Studio .NET), and the gaming engine (I forget the name) have
> already been decided on.  The paper involves people from several other
> departments, including Design, Film & Media Studies, Management,
> English (branching narrative/interactive story-telling), &c.
>
> While I think Squeak would be a hard sell, it occurred to me that there
> are probably quite a few people in this mailing list who know about
> computer gaming and about teaching computer gaming, and that some of
> you might be willing to pass on a few words of advice.  I have asked
> Simon's permission to post this message, including his e-mail address,
> which is "simon at cs.otago.ac.nz".  He has said that such advice would be
> most welcome.
>
>
>