Why do the rabbit holes begin when I take a break?
Hello @Wafth and Welcome to the forums…
The question you should have started with, was:
How much investment would I require to get started with MonoGame to develop a game?
But seeing as you were unprepared to put that together, let me explain briefly, well, I shall attempt to keep it brief… Said the guy who types 2,000~ words every 15-20 minutes or so…
First up, let’s begin with the elephant in the corner, you come from a background which comprises of years of study and practice before you are allowed out into the world to earn Starbucks credits, OK, so, what’s the similarity there?
Well, fundamentals aside, [Basic language skills, English being a handy one no matter where you are from, Maths, no, honestly not as advanced as you might think for now, you can always revisit it in future, and some Logic understanding, square peg in square hole etc.] You might want to brush up on C and C++ using some books from a local library, and I would suggest a basics of programming and then to get familiar with how C# works, take a short walk through Visual Basic, then hit a basics C# book, I would say, considering your day job, roughly 1-3 weeks per book.
After all that I would suggest going for an in-depth book on C# where you just absorb [and code test the examples] before looking into building a game engine.
Feel welcome to ask me for a recommendation list of books, I have plenty to suggest, as I went through a bunch of them myself, still have them on my bookshelves, you don’t need to remember everything, just tag useful code to hop back to for reference.
MonoGame comes set up with a basic engine that you can build upon, as you learn how to create functions with C#, you should easily understand how to put together simple applications/games together.
Note: Making a game and a productivity app are usually completely different, unless your productivity application involved a game engine, though, theoretically they still carry similar functionality behaviour. [They both call functions and they both react to inputs]
Anyway, before I jabber on, Welcome to the world of coding!
Happy Coding!