Another question I have that any answer however vague I would consider valuable. Is there some kind of baseline that will tell me I am ready to look for work in the industry in a junior coding position? I realize there are tons of variables in regards to this. Also I know the industry is said to be notoriously finicky to get your foot into it. That's not what I'm asking about though. I'm asking just as far as my own skills is there some measure(maybe a type of program I'm able to write?) that will tell me "ok, I have a skill that someone could employ me for"? Thanks!

That will vary from company to company, they will put it on their requirements.

The main problem you will face is that there are many people that want to be gamedevs, but then go to work on some other industry (mostly with web development). After a few years they get fed up and try to go to the game industry, and they will go for the junior jobs, but they have many years of experience coding.

If I were you I would try to get one polished game finished, not only it will teach you a lot about gamedev and coding, but it would also be a great addition to your resumé.

If you just pop open an IDE and start trying to code a game then you're stuck using OS functions to do everything. For instance you need a window for your game, that means consulting the horrible to work with windows api, lots of boilerplate code that although interesting to know, is a lot when you're starting. Then you have to worry about rendering, either using GDI(windows default drawing) or something like direct3d(that's even more complicated than winapi to start with!) Libraries like SDL are sort of general supporting libraries that hide the details of those basic subsystems for you. That said if you go that route I recommend SFML over SDL, which is essentially a much more modern library, with a C++ interface instead of C.

If you go that route you'll be writing all the basic code yourself though, you still have to make a window and write a game loop and do all the relatively low level things, handle states, file loading, etc. Engines like unity or unreal are more full featured dev environments. They usually handle all that stuff for you and essentially you're just making assets for them to load and start running for you. Advantages to that are that you get to see and get a basic idea of the different subsystems that games use, many of which you'll have to reproduce at at least a basic level if you make your own games. But they are also kinda overkill.

C++ isn't hard to learn at a basic level, the problem is that you don't understand the nuances of what it is doing so you end up making it do things you shouldn't be doing, that isn't necessarily taught better in other languages though. On the flip side I noticed people coming from a java or c# starting point often look at C++ with arrogance, thinking it just does things in some stupid archaic way, and don't really get why it does it that way.

Ah, I appreciate the detailed explanation. That certainly sounds like it would save a lot of time and effort. I will do some research on SFML then. It seems like there's a balance to be found between going too needlessly low level in your learning or staying so high level you don't fully understand the mechanics of things you are making. I hope to find the middle point.

That will vary from company to company, they will put it on their requirements.
The main problem you will face is that there are many people that want to be gamedevs, but then go to work on some other industry (mostly with web development). After a few years they get fed up and try to go to the game industry, and they will go for the junior jobs, but they have many years of experience coding.

If I were you I would try to get one polished game finished, not only it will teach you a lot about gamedev and coding, but it would also be a great addition to your resumé.

Thanks! I will aim for that as my first marker then. It sounds like getting a junior job in gamedev is a lot like getting a junior job in a decent kitchen. Lots of competition(where I live), and they expect more experience than you can reasonably have. Hopefully I can do some sort of equivalent of how I got my first chef job. Which was polishing my skills at home, and then basically going restaurant to restaurant meeting people and offering my skills. Haha, that being said I had to get my foot in the door by accepting shitty conditions for about a year, but after that initial experience the amount of restaurants that would hire me increased exponentially.