Starting with C# is fine. If you ever need the lower level management that C++ allows, then you can switch over, but for learning, I think your progress will be greater and your frustration lesser (and thus the likelihood that you'll stick with it) if you start with C#.

Of the countless beginner threads around, this one seems far more grounded in reality, so long as you don't expect this to be just a 2-3 month journey before releasing your game. :)

You show some concern for not starting with C++ since most games are written in C++. While it's true that most triple-A games are written in C++, I don't believe this is going to hinder you. Your goal seems to be towards indie game development and not joining a big studio. Maybe you should learn C++ eventually to better round yourself out as a developer, but that's a long way off and not worth worrying about right now. Plenty of indie games are written in C#.

To avoid getting overwhelmed in the early days, I recommend that your first few weeks be in just C# as you're learning the syntax. Once you get the basics down: variables, loops, branching, functions, classes, etc. Make some simple text based games like guess-a-number or hangman.

Once you're ready for more game development, I think starting with XNA/C# is an excellent idea. It allows you to get closer to the low level/inner workings of a game, but it's abstract enough that you can get a sprite showing on the screen in short order which is pretty darn motivating. Motivation is going to be one of your biggest hurdles early on. (later on too). XNA is no longer actively supported by Microsoft, but I think it's still a good choice for learning. You may also look at MonoGame which is an open source port of the XNA framework and the community is still active.

Pong -> Platformer may be too big of a leap of skill. Take a look at this article about which games you should make early on and why.

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/your-first-step-to-game-development-starts-here-r2976

And here are a couple of XNA links that I found very useful:

http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/xna-tutorials

http://www.xnaresources.com/default.asp?page=TUTORIALS

After you've made a couple of simple games in XNA though, I recommend you take a look at Unity. At this future point in your education you should have a decent grasp on programming and understand the basics of game development. Follow a couple of Unity video tutorials and once you have the basics of Unity down, remake a few of the simple games you made in XNA like pong. You shouldn't have to remake all of them, but it's a good way to learn the tool and see how far you've come as a developer.

Sometime during all this, you're going to want to learn more about object-oriented programming, design patterns, software architecture, more advanced C# features, etc. But that will come with time. For now, go crank out a "Hello World" program. It's where we all started at. :)

Good luck, and when you run into problems, let us know and we'll help you out,

- Eck

On a side note (I don't want this to get into an elitist war), if I learn C#, will it be easier to switch to C++. rather than if I learnt on Python? Are the C familials similar like that or no?

Theoretically yes.

You will have a better grounding in some of the syntactical quirks of C++ (ending statements with semicolons...)

But the two languages are dissimilar enough in behavior that it really only provides a minimal advantage.

C# is a good starting point.

Keep in mind, you're going to be learning two things at the same time:
1) How to write C# code
2) How to write a program using logical instructions

The two are not the same. You can accomplish #2 in any language, but the means you're using in this case is via C#. So, when you're struggling to make something work, you need to be careful to ask the question: "Is this a language syntax issue or an issue with trying to figure out how to correctly write instructions sequentially?"

So, with #2, you can actually accomplish this by writing your instructions in english using pseudo-code, such as "Add two to the value X." or "Turn the space ship by 45 degrees and then apply the thruster."

Why is this important? Because you're going to eventually get to a point where you say, "How do I write a for loop in language XYZ which iterates over ten items?". The end result is the same (logically speaking) but implemented differently depending on which language you are implementing it in. So, "programming" is a language independent, abstract discipline, in which you get good at it through lots of indirect practice.

When you're just getting starting with making *any* type of program, you want to start SUPER small and simple. Start with printing the classic "Hello World" onto the screen. Then create a "Guess my number" type game, where the computer picks a random number and you have a fixed number of tries to guess it. Then, create tic-tac-toe. Then try creating something more complicated, like break out. Graduate to tetris. Then maybe pac man or some other old school atari games. Stick to 2D until you get really familiar with the game development process. When / if you eventually shift to 3D, your literally adding an additional dimension and the amount of work grows in an order of magnitude and the complexity increases equally (ie, you can figure out what someone is clicking on very easily in 2D, but in 3D you need to shoot a ray out into the game world and intersect it with a 3D object).

When things get difficult, I find what helps the best is to try to write out what I'm doing in pseudo-code and work out the solution to the problem on a hand-held whiteboard. If I can't solve the problem outside of code, what hope would I have of solving the problem with the additional complexity of code?

Also: If you *really* want to get good at writing code, get good at mathematics! Get good at trigonometry, linear algebra, algebra, etc. You'll be relying on the strength of your math skills every day. You don't want your math skills to be your lowest common denominator which limits your capabilities. Getting good at math should also directly help you get better at writing and conceptualizing good code. for example, if you know the quadratic equation and you want to write a function to solve it, you already know what the objective is and what the answers should be when you test them, and you should be able to break the algorithm down into its component steps and verify that the values are the expected values. This is essentially what all programming boils down to: Do the steps make sense? Do the values match the expected values? Does the final product match the expected product? Now, put it all together to build a program which appears to do magic!