I hear you man. Life makes us make hard choices sometimes. I can only offer my own anecdotes to show that I understand.

When I was ten, I programmed my first IF-THEN game in BASIC on a Commodore 64. (based on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books popular at the time).

But when I went to college, I majored in Accounting because it was "sensible" and my family approved of that idea. (Should have gone CompSci.)

Life happens (I'm in I.T. now, not accounting) and I'm too busy or distracted to seriously chase my dream.

I'm turning 40 this year. Making games is just a hobby now. Someday I'll make something of it...

As for location, I can safely say that there are ZERO major players in the game industry working in Kentucky, U.S.A.

There are a few indies that are successful here, but they are 1-3 man mobile app teams. They don't need me.

So since I'm not moving to a coastline, I'm going to try to start a major company here in Kentucky. (Long Term Goal, right? I'm still a nobody for now.)

Perhaps you can start the industry where you are. Surely there are others in your part of the world that want to make games too, right?

If not, there is certainly a global community to seek partnership and experience. That's why I'm here on this site.

I do not recommend you neglect your studies to pursue your dreams.

But there will come a very specific moment in your life where you will intentionally make the life-changing decision on which career you will pursue.

For me, it was when I declared my major in college. (University, post-secondary education, whatever it's called now.)

When that moment comes, I do recommend that you follow your dreams, not what is "sensible". You'll be happier for it.

But I'm just a guy on the internet. Don't take my advice blindly. You have to do what you think is the right thing to do.

Meerul,

The question for those of us trying to advise you is that we don't know which kind of game programmer you want to be.

a. Independent programmer/developer

or

b. Game programmer working at a game company

If (a), then you need to study business and marketing as well as programming, and familiarize yourself with the regulations governing businesses in your country.

If (b), then you should get a CS degree and check gamedevmap and gameindustrymap to see if there really are no game companies in your country. You might need to move.

And that's just for starters. Once we know which of those you plan to pursue, more meaningful advice can be added, if you ask.

Game development is something that can take years of experience. It took me a whole year to learn how to set up directx and opengl from scratch. However, you can always start out small and start with unity or ogre, I actually started with flash and gamemaker.

That sounds pretty manageable, provided that you have realistic expectations.

1. I take it you are in the equivalent of an American high school, the level immediately below university. Plenty of people pursue new topics in college all the time, and you could certainly start with intro programming and related intro courses if necessary. You don't need to do anything now to upend your schooling plans.

2. Very, very few people are successful in game development with just a secondary school education in programming and related topics. You aren't locking yourself out of anything if you wait for university or learn as a hobbyist and make slower progress than you might prefer.

3. Even with a heavy course load you can still learn the basics of a programming language and learn foundation-level software development skills. As long as you keep a schedule which allows you to focus on your courses, I don't see any reason you couldn't also work on games in your spare time (even if that's just an hour or two per week). Your progress won't be fast, but you won't have the pressure that taking programming classes would force onto you.

A lot of good answers so far. To learn basic programming, AND basic design at the same time, I would recommend studying JavaScript / HTML5 since that is a fairly easy language to use plus you can easily showcase your work.

HERE is a free online "school" to get you started. HERE is a more advanced free course.

Then why don't you get a background? When I first started using the internet (I used to always think it was to be a waste of my money, but then I got cable and was proved wrong), I found pictures of these renderings made by ray tracing in various CAD applications, and from then on I set my goal on making a rudimentary CAD program to make my own renderings like that. I never did really make any progress on learning programming, I just always kept the interest. A year or two later, I became interested in making a computer game. I decided to awaken myself at 4 AM everyday to read a C++ book before working for the day. It has been years after that now, and I am making both my CAD-like application and my computer game, and they are both written in C (although I might actually start thinking about transitioning the project to C++). And it doesn't have to take that long. I had many distractions, and I often quit at different intervals only to start back up again on the project.