Hello all, I'm a fairly experienced .NET web architect looking to move to game development (preferably still within the land of .NET). Anyone have any recommendations on packages, technologies or reading material that can get me started?

I was hoping for a well known and respected book that can take an experienced programmer and teach them the methodologies / techniques behind game development without the beginner's guide to programming if that makes sense...

Thanks!

Nick

I'd recommend Game Engine Architecture by Jason Gregory
Its pretty much a high level overview of a game engine and its subsystems, along with major problems and possible solutions for game-specific code. The "basic c++" section that pretty much every such book will include is only about 8 pages and is composed of some tips that will help any competent programmer not used to working with game-specific code.

Other than that, its pretty much like any other programming. Figure out your constraints (performance, development time, maintainability, etc) and design for them. Game code tends to be intertwined more than any other code that I've seen, so putting in extra effort to make your design modularized and orthogonal will pay off big time in extensibility / maintainability.