answer:I don’t know squat about game design, but I would be very surprised if at least some of their textbooks aren’t standard books about programming and algorithms. It seems to me that you would want to have a really solid foundation in object oriented programming, design patterns, and algorithms, especially if you want to be innovative. To that end I would recommend the Deitel and Deitel Learn to program series if you’re fairly new at object oriented programming, pretty much anything published by O’Reilly, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software , by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides; and Algorithms : sequential, parallel, and distributed, by Kenneth A. Berman and Jerome L. Paul. Here are some books directly related to gamin, I don’t know anything about them specifically, but I found them in the local university library catalog rather than online: Game design foundations / Roger E. Pedersen Game design : a practical approach / Paul Schuytema Fundamentals of game design / Ernest Adams, Andrew Rollings Game design course : principles, practice, and techniques—the ultimate guide for the aspiring game designer / Jim Thompson, Barnaby Berbank-Green, Nic Cusworth Fundamentals of Game Design / Ernest Adams