Well your question isn’t one that can elicit a simple response. Unfortunately. Game programming is a tricky matter, and can get confusing if you don’t know what you are doing – or if you do!
How do you change text color? Well, you first have to decide if you want your game to work in one specific venue (such as MS), or if you want cross-platform support. You’ll need to get some libraries to work with – DirectX for Windows, and various others for varying platforms (the CrystalSpace link I posted before is a multi platform game engine with blosoming support for 3ds max … I have some experience with this, and can offer some advice if needed). From there, look into the API of the specific library you have. There are a variety of books detailing DirectX API structure, and game programming in general.
As for 3ds max support, it all depends on the library you have. It will need to have functions to read in a 3ds file – or you’ll need to get a converter to change your 3ds file to another format (such as a quake file format), and the conversion might not be absolutely perfect (computers are funny like that).
In doing a quick search on google, I came across this:
When I talk to people looking to get into game development some of the first things I often hear fall along the lines of, “How do I make games?” or “I want to make a game like Quake/Everquest/Starcraft and…”. The first is just way out of the realm of answerability, as there are too many aspects to possibly go into, and each of those components can be infinitely complex.
The second, however, falls into just being unrealistic in expectations. Starcraft, Everquest and Quake were all made by teams of professionals who had budgets usually million dollar plus. More importantly though, all of these games were made by people with a lot of experience at making games. They did not just decide to make games and turned out mega-hit games, they started out small and worked their way up. This is the point that anyone who is interested in getting into game development needs to understand and repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes such a part of your mindset that you couldn’t possibly understand life without this self evident, universal truth.
Until you understand that all skills in game development are learned by experience, (meaning to start very small and working your way up) you will be absolutely doomed to never finish your projects. Even the infinitesimal number of teams that do manage to finish a non-trivial project before they have made any smaller ones have to learn incrementally, it just takes them many times longer than if they had started out with smaller projects.