Game Development Resources

Ok, after a couple (or more?) of years with moderator buttons around the posts i read and make, i decided to use them and put a nice sticky thread here with some game development resources. If you have something to add, write it here as a reply and i'll move it in this post.

First of all, of course, there is John's page on game development

. Although he doesn't seem to put much stuff there.

Below is a somewhat categorized list. I may re-sort the list later if i think that the current layout sucks. Anyway. Here we go...

General game development sites
You know them, you love them, you barely visit them.

http://codenewbie.com/ - John recommends it, but personally i haven't visited it more than once.
http://www.gamedev.net/ - The crown of game development sites, at least from a popularity point of view (with a name like that, you wouldn't expect less, would you?). It contains everything, especially old articles who need to get updated and hyperactive forums . Their image of the day, an idea they got from the old flipcode site, is one of my favourite features. I love to see what others are doing . Their for beginners section, though, could need a bit of work.
http://www.devmaster.net/ - My favourite. This is a more community-centric site and they try to keep their forums in a much better state than GameDev's. They also have an image of the day feature and a small collection of articles (which, however, are more up to date and contain very interesting stuff). Also they have a Wiki with some interesting information and a very good section for beginners. Some other parts of the wiki, though are incomplete. Another feature DevMaster has is it's 3D Engines Database containing over 250 3D engines for many systems. The database provides advanced search functionality which makes finding engines a really easy task.
http://www.gamasutra.com/ - Although the site is one of the worst coded and laid out sites i ever saw (excluding some 'i made this in word daddy' sites, of course), it has valuable content. The only negative part is that for most features -even to read articles- you need to register (it's free though). This site tries to be 'everything for anyone' when it comes to game develoment. In some cases (post mortems, news, interviews, job listings, etc) it does a good job, but in others (technical articles - at least lately, since it used to have good such articles) it's not the best you can find.
http://www.gametutorials.com/ - Some like it, but i don't. It tries to teach stuff using comments inside code. At some point you had to pay for the tutorials, but now seems to be free. You still can buy all tutorials (350) in a CD, but the price is expensive for people who just starting and want to learn. I just added the site here only because some people prefer to learn by code.
http://www.gpwiki.org/ - A Wiki about game development! Has much more content than DevMaster's wiki, but some of it's articles are way too theoretical. Well, they won't hurt you, though .

Game development tools and languages
You need them.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ - The best (no arguments accepted ) compiler collection around, including C and C++ compilers. This has only the code, though. For Windows users, MinGW is what you need. After you get that, go to...
http://www.easyeclipse.org/ - EasyEclipse provides some preconfigured distributions of Eclipse which are easy to install and use. Eclipse is a full featured IDE for Java, C/C++ and others (well, mostly Java and C/C++). The C/C++ version currently works only with MinGW.
http://www.bloodshed.net/dev/devcpp.html - If you're low on resources, or netspeed, get this instead of Eclipse and preferrably avoid MinGW above and get the version of Bloodshed IDE that contains MinGW (that's the 9MB one). Bloodshed IDE is a nice small IDE containing basic project and code editing functionality.
http://java.sun.org/ - Want to code in Java instead of C or C++? Go there and get the SDK (and don't forget the docs - they're distributed in a separate package). To avoid looking around for IDEs, you may want to get the SDK package that includes NetBeans, which is a mature IDE. I used it for over a year in my previous job and never had a problem (well, sortof - it took me a while to fully understand how to use their visual designer ). Note that you may also want to use Eclipse as a Java IDE. EasyEclipse provides some Java oriented distributions. If you want to use both Java and C/C++ with Eclipse, though, you need to manually go to http://www.eclipse.org/ and manually select the packages you need.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/flashpro/ - If you want to make webgames, you have three options: JavaScript (for basic games), Java (for complex games) and Flash (for something between). The most common option is Flash and here is where you get it. Unfortunatelly it's cost is very high for most of us, so...
http://www.osflash.org/ - ...go there . It's a Wiki about using free and open source tools to create Flash animations, movies and -of course- games. It's a little harder to develop games using these tools (most are command line tools and you do almost everything using code and xml files), but if you can't pay the Flash license, it's your only option for making Flash games (alternatively, of course, you can make Java games).
http://www.blitzbasic.com/ - Home of the BlitzBasic, Blitz3D and BlitzMAX languages. I don't know much about these, but i know that they have been used in some successful commercial indie games.
http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/tkool/RPG_XP/eng/ - Amanda Fae used this to create Aveyond, 'nuff said.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualcsharp/ - Visual C# Express is Microsoft's IDE and compiler for developing in C#. Currently it's the best tool you can find to create C# programs (not that there is much of a competition though).
http://www.mono-project.com/ - Mono is an open source cross platform implementation of .NET which includes development tools for C# (and other languages), including a nice IDE, MonoDevelop. It's your only option to make C# programs without Windows. If you can't live without Windows and your life won't have a meaning unless you write C# programs, i recommend to use Visual C# Express instead.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna/ - XNA. It isn't bad, but it really needs to be worked more. Unless you have piles of money sitting around, you have some experience developing games and you are a company, then this is the only means to put your stuff in a XBox360. Beyond that, there isn't much to do with XNA. It's promising though. Note that you'll need Visual C# Express to use and develop with XNA.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/ - Visual C++ Express is Microsoft's well-known Visual C++ given for free. It is a crippled version of what you get once you pay for the full one. Not bad for making small apps and libs. If Bloodshed and MinGW seem limiting, get this one. A negative part is that you need get a huge download before making Windows applications - that is the Platform SDK.
http://www.haxe.org/ - haXe is an open source tool for creating Flash, JavaScript and server-side programs using it's own "universal" language. The haXe language is a mix of Java, JS and ActionScript 3. Using the same language and compiler, provides the benefit that the same code can be used in all target platforms. Note that this doesn't apply to all available classes - the flash platform has it's own classes, the JavaScript platform it's own classes and the server-side (neko) platform it's own classes. But some classes (such as the String class) are available in all platforms.

Tutorials
Something to get you started.

http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html - A very good tutorial for making tile based games with Flash. Most aspects apply to other environments too.

Well, that's all for now. I'll put more at some point (it took me around one and a half hour to figure out what to put, so i got tired

), but that's enough to get you started