Here we go..

First there was an idea of creating a game.

After a lot of thinking I came up with the idea to make a real time strategy game in plain 2D, and after that the idea of a story came up. Sounds like it was easy but it wasn't, after a long time the idea was born.

After the idea was born I had to make some investigations of what tools to use since it was a long time since I've made a game before, things had changed a lot.

Last time I made a game I did it in Unity3D but this time I didn't want to go that route.

I decided to create my game in Visual Studio but did only have a license for an older version, I found out that there is a free community license of the VS 2017 which made my decision easy.

Now when I have the VS 2017; I started to bring the story to life by writing things down, I had help from a friend of mine. While brainstorming and after some calculations of how much time it will take I've noticed that this will take years to make. All the code and images with animations in 2D was just not going to happen because I'm just one person and have a daytime job and a child, I had to rethink my strategy a bit.

What are my alternatives to a 2D game; well I decided to go 3D once again like I did last time years back in Untity3D. This time as I've decided not to use the Unity3D environment I started to look for something else but I couldn't find anything free that was great other than XNA which I've had in the back of my head from the very beginning. But Microsoft who made XNA had put it to rest some years back, NO!? I was stranded? Still not want to use Unity3D like everybody else are doing, yes I have my strange stubborn ideas sometimes and this might be one of them.

I took a deep search with my special friend Google and found out that a group of developers had decided to keep XNA alive, they call the framework Monogame today.

After reading and testing Monogame for about a month I was hooked and my decision to use it was clear.

Must create my 3D objects and the world; I'm always using Blender for this so that wasn't going to be a hard decision to make.

Now that I had decided to use Visual Studio 2017, Blender and Monogame; I've started to break my storyline down into pieces so that I could make the functions needed one by one, to see if all the pieces was possible to develop with Monogame.

The first piece; was just to make an 3D object to display on screen and that wasn't difficult to do, task one accomplished! It was just the default Blender cube but there it was, almost had a tear coming there.

Then I tried to display textures on my cube in blender because I've forgotten how to do them, a Youtube tutorial later and there they were.

With my textured cube exported from Blender I loaded it into Monogame to test it and everything was working.

The next thing to try was to make a planet/sphere with textures; because I've decided to make my strategy game round and not flat I made a U/V sphere in Blender and textured it with a planetary looking textures, it was stones and sand but the objects mesh wasn't round enough as you can see in the following image.

I took a look around in Blender to relearn how to use it and found the solution to make it smooth.

Time to add the planet and the box together in Monogame; and the result this time was like this..

I've added some basic lights to the 3D world; the lights added was not going to make it for the final game and I will need shadows too to make the game more alive later on.

I'll quit writing for now because I have other things to do, but I'll be back with more of the story because I have plenty this far to tell you.

See you later.