In order to accomplish this I made the decision that rather than try to come up with a project on my own I would attempt to clone a game that I had enjoyed many years ago.  That game was Crash Bandicoot.  This decision made designing the game more of a focus on technical skills rather than artistic creativity.  Before I would look at this as a way of giving up, not doing the entire thing by myself but I believe now that this allows someone who is not very experience in the field to make a fun game while building their abilities for future projects.

Build the first model of the game seems to be coming along just fine.  In fact the only real hurdle I have had so far is now that it is finished an animated when I export the model the animation gets squirrelly.  This could be an issue with my mesh but I will continue to play and see if I cant find something that works.  Here are some of the first pictures of my model in blender:

The next step was picking a 3d game engine.  For this I ended up going with Panda3d thanks to the suggestion of a friend of mine who is also a developer.  He was mostly interested in using the python interface; however, I decided that I wanted to do it in c++.  This would have been fine until I found out that the gnu compiler is not supported by the library and I would have to do some major hacking to get it to where it would compile.  Instead I decided that this would provide me with the perfect opportunity to learn python.  This makes life extremely easy with code as simples as:

for loading a model.

Over the next few weeks I hope to have a running demo so keep your eyes peeled.