[vitorbal]

Can anyone recommend me some good game development books for someone who wants to create "small" games as a hobby? By "small" I mean that my goal is to be able to create games for ocasions like the GitHub Game Off, or some small indie games

[damian2000]

There's a book here that looks good - published by Packt - http://www.packtpub.com/game-jam-survival-guide/book ... its by Christer Kaitila, a game developer with 17-years experience. I don't think its got any technical information. I haven't read it myself, but these headings from the table of contents look like good advice...

- Go with what you know

- Don't try a new language

- Don't worry about making it beautiful!

- Keep It Simple, Stupid!

- No-art (rectangles) gameplay proof-of-concept

- Heinous hacks and ugly code are A-OK.

[VSerge]

Jesse Schell's "the art of game design". It will give you a solid understanding of what game design is and how you can do it. Also, it's a very good read, which doesn't hurt when you're trying to learn something.

I disagree strongly with the advice consisting of: "start hacking and see what happens". For any kind of product design, starting something without any kind of direction is the surest way to go nowhere.

[saiko-chriskun]

Books? Just pick a framework and start hacking.

[eigenbom]

Just go through tutorials, e.g. ,on pygame.org